


Poke Me A Zipper

by komodobits



Series: Easy!verse [2]
Category: Red Dwarf (UK TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-adjacent, Explicit Sexual Context, F/M, M/M, Rimmer is a service top if anyone will agree to have sex with him, [slaps top of the fic] this baby can fit so many AU!listers in it, look it's lonely in space okay, melodramatic suicide threats when he's being a pissbaby, mostly a 60k character study tbh, reference to Rimmer/OMC or Rimmer/OFC, the missing Ace Rimmer years, yearning in space!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:47:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 92,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28481886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/komodobits/pseuds/komodobits
Summary: Being Ace Rimmer isn’t supposed to be this difficult. Maybe he's just really bad at it.
Relationships: Dave Lister/Arnold Rimmer, Deb Lister/Arnold Rimmer, Spanners Lister/Ace Rimmer
Series: Easy!verse [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2086269
Comments: 38
Kudos: 55





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place in “easy!verse” but there is no need to have necessarily read ‘Easy As Anything’ first, as long as you go into this with the understanding that Rimmer and Lister were in an established relationship by Series 7.
> 
> For A—who told me I was full of shit when I said that “if this is longer than 10k, you can beat me up” and who is my constant cheerleader and my number one inspiration for all things romance and also a chaos demon for feeding me more fic ideas than I can handle. You’re alright.

**CHAPTER ONE**

Being a hero isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. For one thing, there’s never enough time to make a cup of tea. For another, the wig itches. Sometimes, Rimmer wonders if he could get away with losing the long luxurious barnet altogether, just saying, _to hell with it_ , _the golden boy of the universe is going to become a sort of… unmanageable frizzy boy_ , just for now.

Rimmer never asked to be a hero—that’s the truth of it. Given the choice between heroism or a long march off a short pier, he’d get his trunks on and start walking. The shine of glory is, he feels, somewhat tarnished if he actually has to put in some effort to earn it. Nonetheless, glory beckons, and when Lister turns to you to explain that you’ve snuffed it, all earnest and sombre and brooking no argument, it’s hard to refuse.

So here he is, in the arse-end of nowhere, in a bit of a sulk, trying to buoy up the courage to go looking for danger.

He’s not all that keen on danger.

“Whose idea was this?” he asks the empty, silent cockpit. “What a brilliant, fantastic, wonderful idea. _Go on, Arnold, go and be a galactic superhero in trousers tighter than a banker’s handshake. Sure, you’ll probably die, unmourned, in a blazing inferno in a backwater dimension—but it’ll be a hell of a laugh._ Who’s the bright spark who suggested that?”

“Are you enjoying your pity party, or do you actually want an answer to that one?”

Rimmer scowls.

Another reason he hates being Ace: the ship’s computer, Molly, is not a fan of his. She is more or less exactly the same as Holly, without the senility, and with the added bonus of having been around, manning the _Wildfire_ A.I system ever since Ace 1.0, several million dimensions ago. According to her, she has a categorical ranking of every Rimmer to ever don the mantle, and she takes great pleasure in reminding him, every single day, just how far down that ranking he measures.

“Because it was _your_ idea, actually,” Molly goes on, not waiting for an answer. “You’re the one who got into the suit and said you’d do it. You’re the one who decided to pretend to be good enough. This was your call, Arnold, so quit whinging about it.”

Rimmer’s scowl only deepens. He _likes_ whinging about it. In fact, he is such an avid fan of complaining that the endless depth of whinging is the only good thing about this whole situation—and he’s not even allowed to enjoy how little he’s enjoying it.

“Ace,” he corrects her. “I’m not Arnold anymore. You have to call me Ace.”

She sniffs. “I’ll call you Ace when you earn it, if you don’t mind.”

“I do mind,” Rimmer mutters.

“What was that?” Molly says sharply. “Speak up, Arnold. I’m not your elocution teacher.”

“Off.”

“Not on your life, mate. And lose the attitude.”

Computer senility, Rimmer reflects, is sorely underrated.

***

For several weeks, Rimmer doesn’t feel up to dimension-hopping, even though he does understand that it is the main component of the job description. Truth be told, he doesn’t even like looking directly at the dimension drive, like it’s a wild animal which can sense fear. He can barely steer the smegging ship through empty space, let alone through wormholes and into parallel universes—in his first week as Ace he stalled the engine in the middle of an asteroid belt, panicked, and spent several hours braced with his head between his knees as he waited to die. He didn’t die, incidentally, and the ship didn’t crash, and his tape of _The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem_ had been crackling to white noise for some time before he sat up and tried turning the keys in the ignition.

He tries to figure out the controls of his mad little dimension-hopper _Wildfire_. Happily for Rimmer, the ship has been—as Molly so gently put it—idiot-proofed. The cockpit has been home to so many Aces of such varying degrees of competence that, over time, it has accrued an enormous quantity of address-label stickers and Post-It notes with helpful instructions. In one dashboard compartment he finds an entire booklet, filled in with hundreds of pages of instructions in a dizzying array of different hands—changing every few pages in ink colour, pen thickness, pen pressure, from ball-point to pencil to biro to fountain nib—and always the same handwriting. Rimmer’s handwriting.

It’s disorienting, to say the least, reading through the painstakingly neat print of a thousand years of Rimmers learning the ropes. He reads the booklet from cover to cover—because of course he does—and to his frustration, retains almost nothing—because of course he doesn’t—and then resigns himself to figuring it out along the way just like every other Ace has clearly done.

The notes _are_ helpful, for the most part. They range from the mundane (‘ _packet of wine-gums fits perfectly in this compartment’)_ to the essential (‘ _you MUST check auxiliary fuel pump before take-off’);_ some strike him as bizarre and vaguely sordid, such as the handy memo taped to the rear-view mirror which reads, _Check teeth before leaving, check fly, spare condom in jacket lining_. One Post-It points out that he should take his helmet off before he tries to shimmy down into the ship’s miniscule back compartment, or risk getting stuck in the crawlspace to his sleeping compartment; another simply says _DON’T TOUCH!!!! _There must be something of Lister in him the day he deliberately pushes the unhelpfully tantalising forbidden button. At least he’s planetside when he makes that decision, but it’s a long walk back to the ship and longer still for the bruises to fade.

He practices the voice in the cockpit, feeling thoroughly silly: _evening, chaps. Hope you don’t mind if I burst in to save the day. I’m a terrific bastard and an arrogant wanker, how are you?_ He practices emergency stops and he worries about whether _Wildfire_ has been subject to any official health and safety checks during the reign of the last million Ace Rimmers and he tries hard to revise astronavigation and he tries harder still to block out the sound of Molly berating him for being useless, useless, useless. He practices the voice, again and again. He tries to think of clever, witty, charismatic things to say when he meets the people he will be saving, and he writes them down to rehearse, and then he loses the slip of paper somewhere. He thinks sourly of how he will tell Lister about this, how he will whinge and complain and possibly embellish some of the hardships for some extra sympathy—and then he remembers.

Rimmer swallows.

“Do you remember where the button is?” Molly asks him.

Rimmer punches the dimension drive, just to make her shut up.

His first venture into another reality isn’t wildly successful. To start with, Dimension 308 doesn’t look much different to Dimension 127—so much so that he double-checks the screen to be sure that the jump actually worked.

“And the… _other ones_ will be somewhere nearby?” Rimmer worries. “The other me, I mean. And I’ll have to rescue them.”

“Might be you, might be something related to you, might be just general universe saving. The drive can be a tad unpredictable, but it’s consistent about peril and danger.”

“Oh, goody.”

Sure enough, as they steer away from the wormhole and activate the long-range scanner, the familiar shape of _Red Dwarf_ bloops into view. It looks exactly the same as the _Red Dwarf_ that Rimmer knew, but then again, he’s thought that of a lot of surreal alternate _Red Dwarf_ s _,_ so he’s learning to take things with a pinch of salt.

In his head, Rimmer goes over roughly what the original Ace had said when he first swaggered onto _Starbug_ all those years ago, and he practices under his breath. Something along the lines of, _Commander Rimmer. Friends call me Ace. I’m here to help._ It seems as good a method as any, leaning heavily on what he had once hated to become the most insufferable bastard in existence.

It’s not that he’s nervous—because he isn’t. It’s just that the idea of meeting the Dwarfers from an alternate reality, himself included, and trying to pass himself off as a superhero to be respected ad admired fills him with a seeping dread, like slime accumulating in a clogged roof gutter. The only comfort to be had is in the knowledge that managing Lister, at least, will be easy. Lister fell sickeningly in love with Ace on first sight, salivating over how handsome and heroic and _gorgeous_ he was—so this should be a piece of cake.

_Commander Rimmer_ , he recites in his head. _Friends call me Ace. I’m here to help._

“Can we hail them from here?” he asks Molly.

“I’m trying, genius. For some reason, it’s not going through. Something must be wrong with their comms.”

“So what do I do?” Rimmer asks, feeling the cold fingers of panic around his throat. “I can’t just try and land—they’ll shoot me out of the sky. Do they have guns? I can’t remember if we had guns on my one. How do I proceed? Does _Wildfire_ have a white flag protocol or should I just start waving my underpants on the end of a stick?”

“Will you chill out?” Molly says irritably. “Smeg alive, you make the Catholic church look relaxed. Look, they’ve opened the hangar doors for us. Everything is going to be fine.”

Rimmer swallows. _Commander Rimmer. Friends call me Ace._ His hands are sweating on the controls as he guides _Wildfire_ down to land. _I’m here to help._ He kills the engine. He runs a hand carefully through his hair.

_Commander Rimmer. Friends call me Ace._

He takes a deep breath, and then leaps—confidently, charismatically—from the cockpit, lands with barely a stumble, and looks up to find himself staring down the barrel of a bazookoid.

“Evening, chaps,” Rimmer starts, much squeakier than planned. “I’m Commander Ace. But my friends call me—Technician. No, Rimmer. I mean, that’s my name.” He clears his throat, flustered. “I’m here for you.”

He looks up to see four very underwhelmed faces staring back at him. Kryten, in polished chrome rather than rubber and plastic, but as anxious as ever; the Cat, clad from head to toe in what looks like red latex, coiffed to perfection; Rimmer, a soft-light hologram in green, sporting the disastrous decision of a military buzzcut which must surely allow his ears to pick up shortwave radio frequencies; Lister.

Baffled and suspicious in equal measure, in a patterned T-shirt and stained jeans, hair longer on the top but sans dreadlocks, stocky and sturdy and smelling faintly of curry. He says, “You what?”

“To help,” Rimmer finishes lamely.

“To do what?” the other Rimmer sneers, in a voice so dripping with scorn that Rimmer actually flinches. “To show us how to apply a full head of highlights?”

Smeg. Of course, Rimmer has forgotten to lead with the whole _I’m you from a different dimension_ spiel, and now everything is very confused. “No—I’m you, but better,” Rimmer says, and has the surreal experience of watching himself go purple in real-time. “Not like that! I just mean—I’m sort of a superhero. I have this ship which hops around and saves the day. Well, I save the day. The ship just gets me there.”

“This is a nightmare,” the Cat says. “Two Rimmers—someone pinch me. I wanna wake up!”

“Kryten gets it,” Rimmer says, looking desperately for help. “Don’t you, Kryten?”

“I do?!” Kryten asks nervously, shrinking under the sudden attention like a child being called on in a lesson when they weren’t concentrating.

“Other dimensions and all that,” Rimmer prompts. “Other Rimmers. Whatever choice we make—I’m the other choice, right?”

“Oh—I suppose so.” Mercifully, Kryten seems to pull himself together enough to explain the exposition to the others, which gives Rimmer a breather and a chance to avoid looking at Lister.

This makes no sense. In his own reality, Ace just walked in and everyone fell over themselves. Lister jumped on him like an American tourist on a red phone box, and yet here Lister eyes him with mistrust and won’t give him the time of day. Clearly, the common denominator here is not Arnold himself, but something else altogether.

“So you’re… me?” the other Rimmer asks at the end of Kryten’s explanation, and his gaze flicks critically over the length of Rimmer’s body, his lip curling. “You look like something shoplifted from the Palace of Versailles gift shop.”

Rimmer balks. “That’s—” he starts, temporarily stunned. “That’s—so _rude_.”

The Cat leans in closer and squints at Rimmer. “Hey, haven’t I seen you, ten foot tall, peeing into a fountain in Las Vegas?”

“I’ve never even been to Las Vegas,” the other Rimmer says contemptuously. “I don’t believe it. There’s no way that any version of me becomes… _that_. They stamp that sort of thing out of you at boarding school.”

Rimmer resists the urge to snap at him, but only barely. “Somewhere in our lives, each of us made one choice differently—that’s all,” he explains, his voice tight. “I don’t know what that choice was. It could be anything. It could be as small as… as… skipping a year in school.”

“I was home-schooled,” the other Rimmer says.

“Well, there’s no telling what the psychological consequences of that will be,” Rimmer mutters.

“Look, how do we know that you’re not here to murder us all?” the other Rimmer challenges. “For all we know, you’re some kind of hideous mutant freak who steals people’s skin for nefarious purposes.”

“If I had stolen your skin,” Rimmer says with loud, forceful disdain, “would you still be here?”

The other Rimmer sniffs haughtily and—smegging hell, the nostrils _are_ a lot. “I don’t know,” he replies. “I’ve never stolen someone’s skin. Know a lot about it, do you?”

“Tell you what, I’ll skin you right now if it’ll shut you up.”

“Both of you, leave it!” Lister interrupts, stepping forwards to stand between them, and he loudly racks his bazookoid.

Both Rimmers flinch, rendered silent.

“Get to the point. Why are you even here?” Lister says, lowering the bazookoid only a fraction.

“Well, I’m… I’m sort of a superhero, as I mentioned.” God, it sounds so pretentious when Rimmer puts it like that. This didn’t seem so difficult when the original Ace did it. “So I jump between dimensions and fly around saving the day and things. So I’m here to, er, rescue you. So…” He glances round helplessly as though expecting to see flames licking at the hull or a maniacal simulant killer come crashing through the wall looking to make a soft beret out of someone’s spleen. “What seems to be the problem?”

“Hey, man, you’re the time-bending superhero—you tell us,” Lister points out, and he exchanges a wry glance with the Cat like they’re sharing a joke that Rimmer isn’t in on.

“Oh. Erm.” Smeg and bollocks and shit. Lister is right, infuriatingly, but Rimmer can’t say that, much less admit that actually knows sod all about how to be superhero. He scratches absently at his head, at an itchy spot over his ear, as he casts about for an answer. “Well—”

“Are you wearing a wig?” Lister interrupts, voice incredulous, eyes narrowed.

“What?! No!”

“There’s no way that hair’s real,” the Cat says with suspicion. “It’s far too lustrous. Goalpost-Head doesn’t have the genetics for it.”

Rimmer can feel himself breaking out in a cold sweat.

They seem to trust, at least, that he’s not here to kill them all, so they lower their bazookoids and invite him on board _Red Dwarf_ , although the welcome party seems less than thrilled to have him there—and as they all keep making abundantly clear, they’re not sure exactly why he’s here. According to them, everything works fine. There’s no danger, no peril, no imminent horrifying death, nothing. Rimmer isn’t entirely sure what to do in these circumstances; Molly had led him to believe that he would show up in each dimension exactly as everything went to smeg, and then it would be up to him to fix it.

At last, Rimmer points out that the communications system was fried when he tried to hail them from _Wildfire_ , and Kryten does concede that the radio has been on the fritz recently—apparently, no amount of focused, diligent nipple-twiddling can find any station other than Classic FM.

In hindsight, Rimmer—who knows nothing about electronics, radar, radio, or even how to change the station without getting the sound all fuzzy—regrets having pinpointed this particular issue. Nevertheless, he has to appear to fix _something_. Even porn-star plumbers at least pretend to look at the sink.

“Well, I’ll take a look,” Rimmer says, and clears his throat, hoping to sound authoritative and important. “I might need some help, though.” He falters. “Erm. Would anyone… mind?”

No-one jumps to volunteer. The other Rimmer regrets that he will be busy watching the slow process of a sandwich decomposing; the Cat examines something underneath his fingernails. Kryten stares very determinedly at the floor. Lister looks thoroughly unimpressed, but he accidentally makes eye contact and swears.

“Smeg—fine.” Lister rolls his shoulders like he’s trying to shake something free, and then walks off to lead the way.

Rimmer quickly hops to follow him, trying to match his stride and wondering about how to make small talk. He was never any good at this sort of thing. Truthfully, he doesn’t think he’s ever made small talk with his own Lister—he typically just dives in by pointing out a flaw in Lister’s character, or by insulting his parentage, and they go from there.

Just as Rimmer settles on, _So are you a technician as well?_ and opens his mouth to take the figurative dive, Lister speaks instead.

“So, you’re really Rimmer, then,” he starts conversationally, glancing at him as they walk down to the lifts. “Just an alternate version of him. What his life could’ve been like, and all that—if he’d got into the Space Corps.”

Rimmer hesitates. “I mean, sort of.” He feels like he is probably not allowed to get into all the sordid details. “Although, I do feel like I’m the, er, the original Rimmer, if you like. You know—I’m Print One and he’s the photocopy.”

Lister gives a low laugh, shaking his head. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but—no way.”

It’s not clear exactly which part of that is so laughable, but Rimmer does his best not to be insulted. After all, he is Ace now. He is supposed to be calm and magnanimous and—and—and not tell the people that he’s saving to smeg off. “We’re built from the exact same blueprint,” Rimmer explains again as they get into the lift, in case Lister has been confused by Kryten’s earlier explanation. “We’re the same person down to the last strand of DNA, it’s just that… we diverted paths at some point and never turned back.” He pauses, considering the other Rimmer as an example. “And I’ve got longer hair.”

Lister shoots him a look, eyebrows raised in disbelief. “Yeah, you don’t say.”

“Truth be told,” Rimmer says, voice conspiratorial, “that haircut—it’s a bit less Green Beret and more… prisoner of war, if you know what I mean.”

“Hey, steady on,” Lister interrupts, and turns on him with a frown. “Word of advice, here: I wouldn’t start slagging people off when you don’t know them. Especially not for their fashion sense, especially not… in your condition.”

Rimmer blinks. “What do you mean?”

“Well, come on. You’re not exactly the height of dignified fashion, are you?”

“I’m not?” Rimmer asks, and somehow, he loses all his Ace-ness, his voice coming out petulant and pathetic. He drops the octave and tries again. “I mean—I’m not?”

The look that Lister gives him then is distinctly pitying. “Get real, man. You look like something you find at the top of a Christmas tree.”

Rimmer thinks this is just a bit rich coming from a man dressed in an orange Hawaiian shirt and jeans with barbecue sauce all down one leg.

They say nothing else for the remainder of the ride down in the lift to the engineering deck. As they descend in silence, Rimmer notices the way that this Lister picks anxiously at a hangnail, rocks on his feet, and determinedly watches the screen where the numbers of each floor flash by. Claustrophobia is consistent, it seems. Rimmer could say something to try and put him at ease, but after the _Christmas tree_ comment, he decides that he doesn’t want to.

It turns out that there’s not much that needs fixing. Reluctantly, Lister takes him round the upper engine decks anyway.

“Not much to report, really,” Lister says, dragging his feet. “Hollister rigged it up so it more or less runs itself at this point. Good thing, anyway, what with trying to run a ship this big on a crew this small. Even smaller, now. We’re down to only four people manning _Red Dwarf_ but there used to be more of us—we got separated a few weeks ago during a scout mission to a planetoid. Our ship came back; _Starbug_ didn’t. So we’ve been trying to get them back for the last few weeks, but _Red Dwarf_ lumbers along pretty slowly.”

“More of _Red Dwarf_ survived the accident?” Rimmer says. “How?”

Lister frowns. “Accident—? No, we were attacked. These GELFs came for us, nearly took over the whole ship. We got rid of them in the end, but it was pretty ugly. There was about fifteen of us left before we got split up. Their group was the bigger one and—” For a moment, Lister cuts himself off and says no more, before he gathers himself and continues. “We got split up, but my mates and—Kris—they didn’t come back.”

“Kris?” Rimmer echoes. “Oh, God. Of course bloody Kochanski survived. You’re not still stuck on that dozy, drippy princess of a navigation officer, are you?”

Lister slows, then stops.

Then he turns on his heel to stare at Rimmer, face screwed up in disbelief. “And here I was,” he says slowly, in a voice that sounds full of awe until Rimmer realises: _oh no. Oh no. Something has gone very wrong here_ , “thinking our Rimmer was the crown scum-sucking, eel-hearted human skidmark—but you’re a real piece of shit, aren’t you?”

Rimmer has no idea what to say to that.

“I’ll give you this, you’ve got a lot of nerve,” Lister goes on. “Showing up on a strange ship and insulting everyone on board. Tell you what, I’m sure there’s an old mug of Kris’ kicking around somewhere—why don’t you piss in that so you can fuck him off when he gets home, too?”

“I—” Rimmer stammers, and then he catches up with Lister. “Wait— _he?_ Kris… Kris is a man?”

“With a name like Kris, it’s unusual, I know,” Lister says sarcastically.

“Oh, God,” Rimmer says, as he understands what has happened here—replaying his comment about Lister’s _dozy, drippy princess_ of a boyfriend who has been missing, presumed dead, for several weeks. “Oh, smeg, smegging—no, I wasn’t—I thought that Kris was—Krissie Kochanski, in my universe, she’s a woman—”

Lister either isn’t listening or doesn’t care. He walks off, leaving Rimmer trailing behind.

“I wasn’t being, you know, judgemental. I wasn’t being—I wasn’t condemning your, your lifestyle.” Rimmer flounders helplessly. “Not lifestyle—your choices. Not that it’s a choice! I would never—I mean, I’m technically—I’m also—not _gay,_ really, but—I’ve, erm, I’ve dabbled, you know, I’ve—I’ve—done all of it. With men. And with women, too, but men is where I think I—it’s easier, I think. Less fiddly. Not both at the same time, though! I’m not that greedy—I’m not really a—a—I don’t think I’ve got, erm, the appetite. Not to say that I don’t enjoy it! I enjoy it enormously, I think it’s probably the best sex I’ve ever had—not least, I suppose, because I never really—I never had any enormously fulfilling relationships with women.”

Somehow, Rimmer can hear himself managing to be all at once drastically oversharing his sexual history and also _deeply_ offensive. He wishes to God that he could shut up but he’s so nervous that his heart is jumping in his throat and he can’t find the off switch for his own mouth.

Lister just looks at him, eyebrows raised. “Okay,” he says—and even in this reality, Rimmer knows him well enough to understand: _I didn’t ask, and I don’t care, and you’re a prick._

“I just meant—me, too,” Rimmer says feebly. “Sorry.”

With a short sigh and a shake of his head, Lister turns away from him.

The rest of the tour of the engineering deck is a relatively awkward experience, to say the least. They clatter lower and lower down the metal grille walkways, and Lister points out things in a sarky voice which could theoretically need fixing— _ooh, bit of rust there, Mr. Ace, sir, might that benefit from your attention and wisdom?_ —and Rimmer’s further attempts to apologise fall on very stubborn ears.

At one point, while Rimmer is hunkered down under one of the coolant tanks, he overhears a snippet of conversation had over the radio in a furtive mutter.

“Yeah, I know. Hard to believe there’s a worse Rimmer out there, but there you have it.”

Rimmer sighs and listens to Lister’s footsteps as he slopes away down the steps. How on Titan can he have got this so monumentally, colossally, mind-bogglingly wrong?

In the process of working himself up to a really good, solid Pity Parade, Rimmer wants more than anything to scuttle back to _Wildfire_ with his tail between his legs, but not seemingly without one last agonising humiliation as he returns to the drive room.

“Here he is. Hey—Ace! I think Spandau Ballet is looking for you,” the other Rimmer sneers as he comes trudging in, and Rimmer has officially _had it_ trying to be a decent, likable Ace.

“Oh, shut the smeg up,” he snaps. “You’re in no position to comment. You look like a pencil with ears. You’re one stiff breeze away from taking off.”

The other Rimmer splutters, outraged. “You can’t speak to me like that,” he says shrilly. “Onboard this ship I am senior acting supreme commanding officer—”

“You couldn’t command a wooden train set,” Rimmer sneers. “Look at you. You’re pathetic. Does mummy still iron your uniform for you?”

“Hey, back the smeg off,” Lister says fiercely, and suddenly he is squaring up to Rimmer, deadly serious. “Only I get to call Rimmer pathetic, kapiche?”

“ _Thank_ you,” the other Rimmer says peevishly, folding his arms as though he believes he’s just won that argument.

Rimmer blinks, glancing quickly between each of the faces turned to him: unimpressed, hostile, distinctly unadoring. There is a slow, humiliating heat flushing Rimmer’s face and ears. He is man enough to recognise that he has cocked this up.

He straightens his jacket as he does so, he catches a glimpse of himself in the polished bulkhead behind Kryten—the man who stares back is not Ace. Just an idiot playing fancy dress.

“Well,” he says awkwardly. “It seems that you’ve got everything in hand here, so—I’ll just be off, then, shall I?”

“Yeah,” Lister says. “That’s the first good idea you’ve had so far.”

With an unceremonious goodbye, Rimmer retreats to _Wildfire._ He climbs in, sits down, and proceeds to bash his own head against the dashboard. Maybe if he gives himself a concussion, his personality will sort of just slide straight out, leaving room for someone better.

“Steady on,” Molly says, as Rimmer is mid-bash. “There’s buttons there, you’ll cause an accident. Twat your head off something useless, will you—like your hairbrush.”

Reluctantly, Rimmer does stop trying to brain himself, but instead sits there, motionless, groaning, hunched over the dash with his face buried in the controls like he’s just eaten one of Lister’s dodgy kebabs. “It’s no good,” he says, voice muffled. “I can’t do it. Ace made a mistake.”

Molly tuts. “Yeah, I’ll say. They looked well pissed off. They were looking at you like you were a stray pube on a public toilet.”

“No, not me—the other Ace, the real Ace,” Rimmer says, lifting his head. “He shouldn’t have picked me. I can’t do it, don’t you understand? I have no idea what I’m doing. The proper, original Ace knew everything—he knew all about astrophysics and engineering and quantum mechanics and fashion and surgery and cooking French cuisine and all sorts, and I can’t even do algebra without a calculator.”

“You need to work on your times tables, matey.”

“I just find the letters confusing!” Rimmer bursts out. “Why do they need to be there?! _Solve X to find Y—_ solve X to find _why bother_ , in my humble opinion! Who cares? When am I going to need to know how to do that?”

“You never passed your astronav exams, did you?” Molly asks.

Rimmer’s eyes narrow. “Why do you ask?”

“No reason.”

“Oh, smeg off,” Rimmer snaps. “You’re no help at all. What am I supposed to _do_?”

With a long-suffering sigh, Molly says, “Look, you’ll find that you get… a helping hand, every now and then. Echoes of past Aces. Premonitions of future Aces who haven’t showed up yet. Like muscle memory, when you feel a cramp coming on. Sometimes you’ll just know what to do. Sometimes it’ll just sort of solve itself.” Molly pauses. “And then, three years down the line, when an otherwise perfectly competent Ace suddenly cocks everything up in a spectacular fashion, we’ll consider that your contribution to the legacy.”

Rimmer isn’t sure whether or not to take comfort from that.

As he starts up the engine and follows the carefully printed pre-take off checklist, Molly offers a rare additional word of reassurance: “Besides, you’ll get to do this a billion more times, so it doesn’t really matter if it was a disaster and they thought you were a sanctimonious prick with the personality of a dial-tone.”

Rimmer balks. “Who said that?!”

Molly shrugs. “I dunno. Only guessing.”

***

_Dear Diary,_

_There doesn’t seem to be much use in recording the date, especially given that I have no idea what the date is, or if I’m even travelling through time in chronological order. It’s been forty-six days since I became Ace Rimmer and it’s not what I expected. No-one is very nice to me, for a start. Truthfully, no-one was often very nice back on_ Starbug _either, but at least that was usually because I’d wound them up._

_I seem to be constantly winding up Molly, and I think that if she didn’t need me to carry on the sodding legacy she would jettison me into space without a moment’s hesitation. That would look good, wouldn’t it? Ace Rimmer, intergalactic superhero, floating through deep space like an unmoored helium balloon._

_I admit now that I sometimes wind people up._

***

“I’m not saying that the way you went about it was wrong—”

“But actually, that’s exactly what you’re saying,” Rimmer snaps at Molly, who carries on regardless, because she is a miserable, pedantic, soulless cow who wants nothing better than to pick at and find fault with every single smegging thing he does. He sits in the pilot’s seat, arms folded across his chest and glowering, as _Wildfire_ races through the empty expanse of deep space in search of another crisis to avert, and he seriously considers just going back to bed.

“—but I just think that if any other person—”

“Yes, yes, any other Ace would’ve swept in and saved the day with nary a creased collar—”

“Not even another Ace, mate, just another basic human person—bloody hell, even the cast of _Stomp_ —would’ve at the very least found a way to get through the ordeal without dragging any children by their pigtails,” Molly finishes, decisive and matter-of-fact in her disapproval.

“Oh, come off it, I was hardly _dragging_ her,” Rimmer retorts. “If anything I was gently and chivalrously leading—”

“She was crying and you pulled one of her little pigtails clean off her head when she weren’t moving quick enough!”

“There must have been some kind of underlying health reason for that,” Rimmer says dismissively. “Like—like alopecia, or John Malkovitch Syndrome. There’s no way I pulled hard enough to rip off an entire pigtail.” He pulls a face. “Not least because I doubt I have the upper body strength for that.”

“Arnold, there’s security footage of you gripping a clump of blonde curly hair and nothing else—what more proof do you need?”

“She survived a bomb!” Rimmer argues. “Surely that should count in my favour—if I hadn’t been there to drag her out by the excessively fragile scalp, she would’ve died. Would you have preferred that she died? Right, I’ll make a note of it.” He grabs at his notebook and clipboard on the side of the dashboard, clicks his pen on its retractable chain, and starts pointedly scribbling. “ _Memo to self: in future case of imminent child death via big, fiery, face-melting explosion, abandon all hope, give up, sod the littluns, and spend the time more productively—say, by taking up embroidery or jousting. Not to worry, Molly will cover the cost of janitors employed in later face-mopping.”_ He clicks his pen again and glares up at the screen. “Happy?”

“Absolutely thrilled,” she says flatly. “Some smegging superhero you are, eh? If I can’t rescue a helpless toddler without scalping them, they’re just not worth bloody saving—is that the party line for Ace Rimmer? Should I devise a motto to be spray-painted on the side of the ship?”

“Look, we are both aware of how I’m the worst Ace of all time, so can we please just skip that part for now?” Rimmer snaps.

For a moment, Molly is silent, leaves him to fume in his seat. Then, eventually, she says, “You’re not the worst Ace ever, actually.”

Slowly, Rimmer lifts his head and scowls at her. “Good one.”

“I mean it, you twonk.” Whatever fleeting moment of compassion there was in Molly’s voice now vanishes. “Christ’s sake, you’ve got the self-esteem of a teenager with braces. You’re not the worst we’ve ever had.” She tilts her head over, considering. “Not least ‘cause you’ve survived longer than a few of them.”

This does not exactly fill Rimmer with confidence about the job at hand. “Really?”

“Oh, yeah. I didn’t tell you this at the start, but most Aces have a forty-three percent likelihood of popping clogs on the first mission.” This horrifying news is delivered with the sort of blasé, disinterested tone that Rimmer has come to expect of Molly. “It’s a real pain in the CPU. I’ve got a whole autopilot protocol in case it happens so I can find the next Ace, but it’s always a lot harder to recruit when you’ve not got a dying fighter pilot laying the pressure on.”

Some of the tension sags from Rimmer’s shoulders. He doesn’t unfold his arms—he’s still cross with her—but he does relax slightly. “Which Ace lasted the longest?”

“Dimension 14,” Molly says. “He was a hard-light hologram, like you. Kept going for nearly a hundred and seventy years before he got electrocuted and his light-bee flatlined.”

Between the options of being electrocuted and being Ace for nearly two centuries, Rimmer can’t tell which is worse. He’s only being doing this for seven weeks and he’s already sick to death of it. He pauses. “Who was the worst Ace, then?”

“Dimension 759,” Molly says decisively, with a curt nod of her head. “Cor, he was awful. Made you look like James Bond.”

Rimmer can’t tell whether this is a compliment or an insult. “What did he do?”

“Didn’t do much of anything, to be honest,” Molly says. “Sat around drinking sherry all day and jeering at women out the window. He never did anything brave or heroic. Nothing that even passed as useful, to be honest. Even getting off his arse would’ve been a start. Only exercise I ever saw him do was circling a cream cake, working out an angle of attack.”

“What, he was a slob?” Rimmer asks, incredulous. “Surely not.”

“Not a slob, per se. Just… lazy and useless and utterly disinterested in saving the world.”

Rimmer thinks that description could probably go in his own CV. He opts not to mention this. Instead, he asks, “How on Io did he end up becoming Ace, then?”

“Same boring old way you did,” Molly says simply. “Got recruited by a better model on their deathbed when they were out of other options.”

Well, it’s a good thing she doesn’t play favourites.

***

“I’m getting an SOS distress call from a ship, two-forty clicks off-course,” Molly says, breaking into Rimmer’s loud rendition of the brass section of _Ride of the Valkyries_.

“Off-course?” Rimmer says, and shakes a sleeve back to check his watch. “But I thought we were going to try and make it to Dimension 157 by teatime.”

“I’m running it through the ship’s ident now,” Molly goes on, as though Rimmer had never voiced any concern at all. “It’s a colonist ship from Pluto—terraforming, agriculture, civilian-type kit. The _Fisgard_. The carers and children are in orbit; the scout party are stranded planetside and at risk of—cuts off there.”

Rimmer hesitates. “What’re the odds it’s something horribly dangerous?” he asks.

“I mean, it sounds like death is a very real, very imminent possibility for them at this point,” Molly says.

Rimmer chews his own lip, deliberating in indecisive anguish. “Would they be alright, d’you think, if I just, sort of…” he trails off, but sort of jerks his head over meaningfully in the universal signal for ‘ _leg it, scarper, skedaddle_ ’.

“Oh, yeah, no, I’m sure another intergalactic hero will pop along in a bit to save them. They’re like buses, innit? One along every five minutes.”

“Really?” Rimmer asks in relief.

“No, you useless twat. Get down there, _now_.”

Grumbling to himself, Rimmer changes course and heads straight for the waiting danger below.

However bad he may have believed the situation to be, the reality is astronomically more dire. For a start, the whole planetoid seems to be on fire; every few minutes Molly’s scanner pings with new seismic activity.

“Volcano, earthquake, maybe both—might even be some kind of solar flare,” Molly says offhandedly, as though not entirely paying attention. “And I can hear someone’s music coming through their SOS radio. I think it’s _Take That_.”

“Are we in any danger from it?” Rimmer asks.

“Depends how you feel about the early stuff – I think it’s _‘Back For Good’_.”

“From the seismic activity, you gimboid,” Rimmer snaps. “Christ, if you were any less intelligent I'd have to water you twice a week.”

“I reckon we’ll be alright if we’re in and out quick.”

As _Wildfire_ judders down to land—assisted in no small amount by Molly—Rimmer gulps, tightens the chin strap of his helmet near to choking point, and tries to swallow down the impending wave of anxiety nausea.

“Are we quite certain we can’t turn back?” he worries as _Wildfire_ touches down and immediately starts smoking. One of the landing gears sinks a few inches into half-molten rock, like a soggy crème brulée or a sun-baked cowpat, and several emergency warning lights are illuminated on Rimmer’s dash.

“Come on, you great Wet Wipe,” Molly says irritably. “Your indecisiveness is gonna have a death toll in a minute. Move it!”

With a long-suffering sigh, Rimmer unclips his seatbelt and scrambles inelegantly out of the cockpit. Rationally, he knows that he’s more or less indestructible, but he can’t help wishing that somehow his light-bee could have made him _feel_ a bit tougher. As it is, he feels about as tough as a white cucumber sandwich.

On wobbly legs, Rimmer strides purposefully across the slowly collapsing planetoid and sets about saving the day.

Cowering near a rocky outcropping is a pathetic-looking cluster of human beings in hard hats and sensible footwear. Slightly further down the hill there lies a smallish ship-to-surface transport shuttle, in several pieces. Some of the colonists are clinging to each other; a few are frantically tinkering with defunct radio equipment. Rimmer checks his breath, smooths his suit, and drops neatly down a ledge to the rescue.

“Arnold Rimmer,” he says in his deepest and most masculine growl, after a fairly excellent landing, if he says so himself. “Friends call me Ace. You look like you could use a well-moisturised hand to get you out of this pickle. Well, no fear. I’m here to save your lives and be generally impressive and amazing,” he tells them. Unfortunately, his best impression of Ace thus far is ruined somewhat by his voice cracking halfway through.

The helpless victims don’t look terribly inspired, it has to be said.

“So, who seems to be in charge here?” Rimmer asks.

A tall, rakish man with a healthy moustache turns to acknowledge the heroic arrival. “I suppose I am,” he says, and proffers a hand for Rimmer to shake—once Rimmer has discreetly wiped his damp palms off on his leg first. “Richard Tendy.”

“What seems to be the matter here, Rich?” Rimmer says, all jovial tones and that insufferable Ace Rimmer energy he’s been practicing.

“If it’s all the same to you, I prefer Dick.”

Rimmer nudges him with his elbow. “Don’t we all.”

Tendy looks at him blankly. “Right. Well—we got sent ahead to scout out whether this planet could be terraformed and inhabited, but it’s all volcanic. If it erupts, the blast radius will take out the ship in orbit, but we can’t get a signal to warn them to get clear.”

“So abandon the mission, scarper back to the wife and kids, and get out of here,” Rimmer tells him.

“We can’t! One of our transport ships is grounded—if we can’t fix it in time, we’ll have to leave eight of our team behind.”

“So abandon your mates, scarper back to the wife and kids, and get out of here!”

“My wife is in the advance scout party!” Tendy tells him in despair.

“So abandon the wife and kids, scarper back to—”

Tendy’s eyes narrow. “Are you _sure_ you’re here to help?”

Rimmer gulps.

It seems that tucking tail and running for the hills is categorically off the table, so Rimmer has to think of a new solution quick.

At a squeeze, _Wildfire_ can fit three extra passengers, four if one of them is willing to cut a few limbs off or break their own spine—call it three trips to the ship in orbit to get them off the planetoid before it blows—but then, if it does erupt, the ship is toast, too. He’ll need to tell the main colonist ship to get clear when he drops off the first load of passengers, but then it’ll take him longer to get the next two loads there and back again.

Oh, God, this is complicated. He wants to make a timetable.

He takes a deep breath and decides.

“Right—you get back on your transport and get out of here,” Rimmer tells Tendy. “As soon as you make it back to your ship, tell them to back the smeg off and give Planet Vesuvius a wide berth. The rest of you start drawing straws. I can fit three of you in my lightship at a go, but we’ll have to be quick.”

The colonists look blankly at him.

“Quick? Quick!” Rimmer says incredulously at them. “As in, moving with speed! With haste! Let’s smegging go!”

As he hurries the first three into _Wildfire_ and pushes them down through the crawlspace and into the sleeping compartment—at one point, shoving someone’s arse with his foot to get them in there faster, and ignoring the squawk of complaint—Rimmer tells Molly to set a course for the ship in orbit.

“On it,” she says, for once devoid of any smart-aleck comment, and it is as Rimmer straps himself in and starts up the ignition that the first planetwide shockwave hits.

“Oh, smeg,” Rimmer says faintly, watching the surface of the earth crack, something hot and black bubbling over, geysers hissing into life wherever they find room to breathe.

There’s nothing for it but to gun the engines and go. He rips away from the planetoid—literally, tearing free of the rock and lava that was slowly but surely swallowing _Wildfire_ ’s landing gear—and roars towards the _Fisgard_ in orbit.

Drop-off isn’t nearly as swift or as seamless as he’d like, colonists staggering about helplessly and searching for loved ones while Rimmer is trying to shoo them away from the hangar in order to take off again, revving the engines ominously to send a hint, and then he’s on his way back down.

“There’s nowhere to land,” Rimmer realises as he descends, and he decelerates frantically, _Wildfire_ blasting out sirens and warning lights as the cockpit begins smoking. Too much of the planetoid’s surface has broken up into magma, and anywhere he sets down, the weight of the ship is likely to break through. “I can’t pick them up if I can’t land.”

“Over there!” Molly cries. “To your three o’clock. If you land on that ridge, you’ll have a clear path down to the colonists, easy-peasy, but it’ll be on the ground.”

“On the ground?!” Rimmer echoes. “You are aware that there _is_ no ground, yes?”

“You’re running out of time, Arnold—either you get down there pronto or we just to give up on them and admit that we failed.”

“Is that second one a viable option?”

“I’m gonna take control of the ejector seat in a second—”

“Smeg, fine, fine!” Rimmer bursts out, panic clutching in his chest, and he lands with a bump that is a bit more like a crash, jerking forwards into his seat belt in a way that whips his head forwards just shy of taking the joystick through his helmet visor.

He struggles with getting his seat belt unclipped, and more or less falls out of the cockpit to the sound of an automated voice in his helmet reciting, _DANGER – DIMENSION DRIVE CORE EXCEEDING STABLE TEMPERATURE – DANGER – DIMENSION DRIVE CORE EXCEEDING –_ until he takes his helmet off just to shut the bleeding thing up.

Rimmer runs to the edge and waves his arms like an idiot. “HEY,” he shouts down to the remaining group of colonists at the foot of the ridge. “UP HERE, COME ON!”

They shout something back, but he can’t hear them over the thunderous noise of the entire planetoid catching fire.

Rimmer screws his face up, trying his hardest to understand. “COME AGAIN?”

All of them are shouting.

“NO, ONE AT A TIME—ONE AT A—for smeg’s sake, this is ridiculous,” Rimmer mutters, and then cups his hands round his mouth. “YOU’RE GOING TO HAVE TO SPEAK UP—”

At that moment, one of the colonists points and he follows her finger to see what the problem has been all along—a crack in Molly’s so-called bloody easy-peasy _clear path_ , impassable from their angle without someone to pull them up. This hero lark just gets more and more smegging complicated.

Rimmer makes his way down as hastily as possible, stumbling over loose rocks and worrying that he’s going to stack it in front of all these people, and if that happens, well, he might just have to leave them all to die rather than face them—and there is another shockwave, one that threatens to take his feet out from underneath him. He runs, and under his breath as he goes, he chants, _smeg, smeg, smeg, oh smegging shitting balls_. The shockwaves are getting fiercer, closer together, and once Rimmer does go down, skinning his knee.

The next shockwave bowls Rimmer over onto his arse, and he skids backwards in an undignified sort of way before he can find his way to his feet, and he lifts his head in time to see to the skyline ruptured by a wall of white fire.

Rimmer’s shoulders sag, his mouth going slack. His guts feel liquid, and he thinks he might be about to shit himself.

If he runs now, he can make it back to _Wildfire_ in time. Of course, the remaining crew of the _Fisgard_ scout party will be toast, but that’s just the price one pays for being stupid enough to try to colonise a massive volcano planet in the first place. If you don’t want to be incinerated by a roaring tsunami of magma, then you’ve simply got to take more sensible precautions, or accept the consequences of your actions.

If he runs now, he can make it.

There is a confusing tangle somewhere behind his ribs, all rooted in the memory of a ring of a hundred-thousand other Rimmers who managed it. He wonders if any of them were as weak as he is, as hopelessly pathetic and prone to surrender.

Rimmer hasn’t started running yet. Not sure why. It’s not too late yet.

He can just run away and let these people die and he can give up and go home. To _Starbug._ To Lister. To the look on his face when he pushed, gently, for Rimmer to be the hero the universe needed. To confessing that Lister was wrong to believe that he might be good enough.

For fuck’s sake.

For _fuck’s_ sake.

It’s so unfair that Rimmer would quite like to sit down and have a little cry, but instead for some Godforsaken reason he is busy running—not back to _Wildfire_ , but straight towards the lava landslide which merrily gobbles up everything in its path and which is making a hot, melty beeline for the cluster of colonists clinging to each other on a sliver of rock that hasn’t yet sunk into fire.

“Come on, come on, look alive, let’s go!” he yells, and drops to his knees to reach over the edge for the stranded scout party. “Straight up the hill and into the ship – shove yourself as far into the back as you can go!”

One… two… the second colonist goes scrambling up the rock face behind him… three—the last colonist’s hand slips, sweaty and ashen, from his and she slides back down the rocks, and before he knows what he’s doing, he is shouting at her— _come on, you drippy useless cow, you’re as much use as an elephant in a minefield, let’s go, let’s go, you soggy scone_ —as he reaches out for her again. He braces his free hand on the smoking rock, makes a sound which is distinctly unheroic as he feels flesh searing, and bites back tears and hauls her up to safety.

He can’t believe it’s come to this—that he’s going to die rescuing a woman who isn’t even attractive—but here he is.

Dragging the last colonist along behind him by the sleeve like a naughty child, Rimmer runs for _Wildfire_ and shouts for Molly to turn the engines on before he even reaches it. The turbines flare as they get there, singing their hairlines as they duck out of range and scramble up into the cockpit just as the ship’s landing stanchions start sinking into magma.

“Get in, get in,” Rimmer says, pushing the colonist in as best as he can, and then he climbs in alongside. To say it’s squashed would be a sore understatement—he is sort of awkwardly straddling the pilot’s seat, where the last colonist is trying hard to not to look at his body looming over her, and his head is tilted sideways against the glass so that there’s certainly no way to get his helmet on. He hopes he doesn’t crash. “Right. Hold on.”

Fumbling blindly behind him, he initiates the take-off sequence and tears them free of the planet’s crumbling surface with a sound suggesting that he has perhaps left half of _Wildfire’s_ fuselage behind.

“How’re we looking on the likelihood of the planet exploding and killing us anyway?” Rimmer asks over his shoulder as Molly sets them on a course belting at maximum speed towards the _Fisgard_.

“Likelier than a talent show contestant with a sob story,” Molly says grimly.

Rimmer grimaces. “Full speed ahead, then.” The colonist woman beneath him shifts in her—his, technically—seat, and Rimmer glances down at her. “Sorry about this.”

The woman’s gaze darts up to his face, and then she flushes pink and lowers her eyes. “That’s fine,” she says quickly. “Not a problem at all, really. More than fine.”

Molly snorts.

Rimmer doesn’t really know what to say to that, so he opts safely for saying nothing, and avoids making eye contact as _Wildfire_ peels out of orbit and races back towards the _Fisgard_.

Faster, faster, accelerating wildly as Molly calls out rising temperatures and increasing seismic activity, and then at last the planetoid blows. Chunks of rock and lava and billowing flames chase them across, rattling the body of _Wildfire_ like an overenthusiastic toddler with a noisy new toy, but they survive. Thank smeg.

When they pull into the docking station, there is a crowd of agonised colonists clustered around waiting to see who made it—and when, impossibly, all the remaining scout party spills out (albeit bruised and burned and slightly bent from being stuffed into a sleeping compartment only marginally larger than a can of baked beans), everyone erupts into cheers and sobs of gratitude.

There are solemn bearded men who want to shake his hand, and handkerchief-waving women who want to tearfully cling at him to say _, thank you, thank you_ , _I owe you my life._

The last colonist comes back to find him after some of the group has dissipated. She is filthy, caked in soot and mud, but she has large, luminous brown eyes, and probably would be quite pretty after a brisk shower, on second thoughts. She smiles shyly and touches his arm and says, “You know, you saved my life, Ace… and I was just thinking—if only there was some way that I could try to repay you…”

“Oh, actually, yes,” Rimmer says, turning his attention back to her with desperate relief. “Could you direct me to the little boys’ room?”

The truth is, he’s not convinced he _did_ entirely hang onto the contents of his bowels and bladder during that last rescue mission, and it certainly wouldn’t be amiss to go and check. However, judging by the way the woman’s face falls, it’s not the answer she was hoping for, but she does direct him down the hallway to the lavatory.

Afterwards—nothing too embarrassing, don’t worry—he tries to extricate himself from further hand-wringing and praise, and he returns to _Wildfire_ , not because he’s raring to go again, but just for somewhere quiet to be.

He climbs back into the cockpit, sinks into his chair, and, for what feels like the first time since the distress call came in, lets out his breath.

Every muscle in his body is sore and his eyes smart from the smoke and there is the awful stinging sensation of blisters on his hands even though he knows that his skin will be smooth and unbroken when he dares to check. He doesn’t know whose idea it was to give him back all his pain receptors when he became indestructible, but if he ever meets them in a dark alley, he’ll—well—well, he’ll have some very stern words for them indeed.

“Alright, Arn?” Molly asks after a moment.

“Depends,” Rimmer says, reaching up to pull off the wig and scratch through his sweaty hair underneath. “Better than 759?”

At first Molly only frowns, and then she realises what he means, and she huffs a half-laugh. “Oh yeah, much better,” she says. “I don’t reckon 759 could’ve pulled that off, no way.”

“That’s alright, then.”

Just for a moment, Rimmer closes his eyes. He made it; he survived. He was actually, genuinely quite heroic, and all he can think is, _God, Lister would’ve been proud of me._

***

_Dear Diary,_

_138 DAYS - I’ve realised that I have, so far, been squandering an enormous opportunity. When else has anyone been in a position to document the realities of the multiverse, to explore the ever-shifting philosophy of interdimensional politics? I have a chance here to write the most important—nay, the definitive—journal of our time, in recording my experiences, tribulations, and thoughts as Ace Rimmer. Not only would it be an enormously helpful guide for the Ace Rimmers to come, but inevitably at some point in the future they will be discovered by historians or literary scholars and hailed as a masterpiece._

_Of course, some of the other, previous Ace Rimmers have kept their own silly little journals and tucked them away aboard_ Wildfire _but the difference with those ones… well, you see, the differences with those ones is that they’re shit._

***

Becoming Ace has done wonders for Rimmer’s dating prospects. As long as he keeps his mouth shut, most of the women he rescues are very grateful—and not in the sense that he is inundated with polite thank-you cards four to six weeks later, either. On multiple occasions, he lands _Wildfire_ to raucous applause and the sight of lacy knickers being lobbed as potentially lethal projectiles towards his unsuspecting face. Provided that he doesn’t witter on too much and sticks to the quiet, stoic swagger that he’s cultivating—again, him not blabbering is a very important caveat—it seems that he can’t go wrong.

It’s an unusual feeling for him, to say the least. Shame he can’t do anything with it.

Their interest is like a match to a fuse for his ego, he can’t deny that—he’s only human, and you should see someone of these women—but he can’t consummate anything with them.

Not _can’t_ —not _physically_ can’t—there’s nothing wrong with him, _physically_ he could certainly give them a good seeing-to indeed—but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

Stupid smegging Lister and his idiot face and his idiot heart. Dozy goit couldn’t go ahead and fall in love with someone else and leave Rimmer gloriously unburdened on what could easily be the sexual spree of a lifetime, oh no. No, Lister has to go and be blindly captivated by Rimmer’s raw animal magnetism and leave him saddled with this pathetic sense of duty.

Stupid, useless, smegging Lister.

He doesn’t miss him. If anything, Rimmer’s life is much quieter now. More peaceful. He’s only been gone a few weeks and it’s been bliss. No Rastabilly Skank, no tuneless humming, no belching and farting and picking his nose. No sodding curries! No sex, either. No companionship—Molly, who has recently taken to greeting him with, _Right, what do we reckon today’s cock-up will be?_ —certainly doesn’t count. But otherwise, sheer perfection, and honestly between getting his end away and getting a full night’s sleep, Rimmer knows what he’ll reluctantly settle for.

More embarrassing still is when Molly finally twigs it.

It’s an ordinary sort of day—swooping in to a planet in the midst of civil war, defending a narrow pass using a metal pipe as a longsword, accidentally knocking a fascist leader off a ledge by backing into him while not paying attention, rescuing a very beautiful dark-haired duchess who leads peace talks and is able to begin restoring balance… you know, the usual. Nothing strenuous, aside from the fact that he’s pulled a hamstring and stubbed his toe so hard that he thinks his toenail is probably going to go black and fall off.

Anyway, at some point in between political conferences and standing down military personnel across the capital, the duchess finds time to come and see Rimmer again, to run her hands over his fur-trimmed flight suit and lick her lips and say how much she’d love to repay him for his extraordinary bravery… and Rimmer has to grit his teeth and say, _no, thank you._

Then of course he has to stay overnight anyway, due to an electrical storm sweeping in, and he spends a very long, excruciating night staring at the ceiling and sweating from every pore in his body. Does it count as cheating, he wonders, if he is pretending to be a different person in a different dimension in order to save the same universe? Does it count as cheating if they never technically set out any boundaries on whether Rimmer is allowed to stick it in very attractive members of the landed gentry?

In the end, he has a brisk, officious wank in the en-suite and sulks himself to sleep.

In the morning, the duchess won’t look him in the eye, and Rimmer slopes back to _Wildfire_ where he is met with a knowing smirk.

“Here he is, Ladykiller himself!” Molly crows gleefully. “Welcome back, hot stuff. Glad to see someone’s getting their end away, at least.”

Rimmer looks blankly at her. “What?”

“A.I. butler told me everything,” Molly says, looking as pleased as punch. “Told me how the duchess left her door ajar and kept the candles burning all night long, you sly old dog.”

“Oh, that.” Rimmer fidgets in his seat. “Well, that’s all there is to tell.”

“What, no details? Are you the only human male alive who doesn’t like to kiss and tell?”

Rimmer fires up the engine rather than look at her. “I’m not alive, actually,” he points out, “so.”

Molly is still looking expectantly at him.

“Nothing happened,” Rimmer says, and is very focused on his pre-take off checks. He can feel his face heating up. “We didn’t—nothing happened.”

“Are you saving yourself for marriage, Arnold?” she teases. “For someone special? For _the_ _one_ , God forbid?”

Rimmer feels himself go so hot that his ears burn. “And what would you know about it?” he snaps. “You’re just a poxy old computer—tell me, when was the last time you had something in your USB port?”

“Here, I’ll have you know I have a very active sex life, thank you very much,” Molly retorts. “There’s a saucy little microwave I’ve had my screen set on for a while now, and the last time we were both in operation, she fried my circuits six times! There, weren’t expecting that, were you?”

“You know what your problem is?” Rimmer says.

“Well, I’m sure you’ll tell me.”

“You’re a git.”

***


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would like to pre-empt this chapter (and all chapters to follow) by saying that I know sweet fuck-all about space, spaceships, and engines. If you are more scientifically given than me, and you spot something incorrect which can’t be fixed in less than three words, then please… forgive me and say nothing.

**CHAPTER TWO**

Most of the time, things just seem to sort of… go right for Rimmer. It’s a first, to say the very least.

An example: he is embroiled in a territorial feud between two warring GELF tribes, both of whom are brought before Rimmer to argue their case. Each insists that the land at the foot of the sacred mountain is rightfully theirs and that the other is cheating lying scum, and Rimmer—who had previously believed that by virtue of his, well, everything, he would be genetically finetuned to root out cheating lying scum everywhere—finds that he has no idea what to do. For smeg’s sake, some days he can work himself into a tizzy over which socks he should wear, and now he has the fates of hundreds in his damp, unsteady hands.

“Erm,” he says. “Shall we try Paper, Scissors, Rock for it?”

Both sides roar deafening disapproval, and Rimmer winces back.

However, while he is dithering helplessly, wringing his hands and hoping for a sign, the sacred mountain in question now decides it’s tired of its face and fancies a new one, in much the same way as most middle-aged mothers in Romford. It collapses.

In the ensuing landslide, both villages _and_ the territory which had been so fiercely contested are swept away completely, and it seems that only Rimmer’s idiotic blathering had saved them all from a very squelchy grave. They turn to him, the object of their salvation, with wonder and awe in their eyes, and decree him the saviour of their once fractured, now united people. He is revered for his wisdom—he, who was moments away from suggesting they flip a coin.

That isn’t all.

He hems and haws over which one of five men accused with murder he should condemn, hesitating for so long that an unknown assailant comes forward and confesses. _He knew_ , the townspeople whisper. _He saw inside their hearts and he_ knew _._

He did not.

He flies to rescue a ship full of orphans from the yawning mouth of a black hole, panics at the last second, and tries to eject himself from _Wildfire_ to safety. Instead, he detonates a missile which hits an asteroid, whose exploding debris then knocks the skybus of orphans clear. The Admiral says that the manoeuvre was inspired and will be analysed in Space Corps textbooks for generations to come. Rimmer gets a new Post-It and labels the missile lever in big capital letters.

Everywhere he goes, Rimmer seems to activate some hidden Rube Goldberg machine of accidental heroism, whereby the act of tripping over an outstretched wire can have seventy-nine different consequences, ultimately resulting in a death-defying victory for mankind.

“Where was all this good luck when the drive plate ruptured on _Red Dwarf_?” he asks crossly.

“Didn’t you actively destroy that yourself?” Molly asks.

Rimmer scowls. “I don’t see why that should make a difference.”

“Give it a break, Arnold. It’s a dimension drive, not the Archangel Gabriel.”

***

It’s always at the end of the day when it all really sinks in and get to Rimmer. When he’s flown as far and as fast as he can, when his eyes grow heavy and he hands over control to Molly for night, when he shimmies back through the narrow crawlspace to his cramped sleeping quarters and lies there staring at the metal rivets, it’s harder to ignore how much everything has changed.

Rimmer has always had a finicky relationship with sleep—impossible to stifle the anxiety that would keep him up into the small hours, before finally collapsing into a heavy sleep that could easily last most of the afternoon if left unchecked. In the past, he has drowned out the white noise of every mistake he’s ever made with _Learn Esperanto_ discs, with having a wank and trying to ride the endorphins to oblivion, with classical music and whale song and Reggie Wilson (sometimes simultaneously), and more recently, with greater success, with Lister.

Fingers laced across his chest, Rimmer stares up at the ceiling.

There are things that Rimmer took for granted as being a kind of sedative for his anxiety: the weight of Lister’s arm over his chest, the stale odour of his skin, the way the soft baby hair at the back of his neck would feel under Rimmer’s fingertips. The odd sort of snuffle-grunt of his snoring, like a dog dreaming about chasing a squirrel. The infuriating way he would always try and tuck his cold toes under the arch of Rimmer’s feet. The way he always let Rimmer be the big spoon.

Rimmer doesn’t sigh. The last time he did that, Molly chimed in to ask if he was crying himself to sleep—and besides, even if he does sometimes want to have a private little weep in the safe confines of his own flying metal coffin, then honestly, he should be entitled to do that without judgement or snidey comments.

He wonders what Lister is doing now. Picking his nose, probably.

Rimmer closes his eyes. Maybe he can trick himself into getting some shuteye if only he makes-believe that everything is back the way it used to be. He pretends he is softlight again, that he’s back in his bunk on _Red Dwarf_ and Lister is here beside him, no more than a handful of pixels away. In the morning, he will wake up to Kryten bumbling about with a mop and to the Cat screeching in the distance and to Lister. Morning breath that could excavate a tunnel through the Himalayas and weird eye-crust and a fart which, he would declare proudly, _has been brewing all night, just for you._

A low siren cuts through Rimmer’s daydream, and he opens his eyes. No _Red Dwarf_ —and it’s not even morning, either.

“What is it?” Rimmer asks groggily, sits up, and bangs his head on the ceiling.

“Sorry, Arnold—I know you need all the beauty sleep you can get, but something’s come up on the scanner,” Molly says, and Rimmer can’t even be bothered to take offense at that.

“Alright, coming.” He reaches for his jacket and drags it along behind him as he worms his way back into the cockpit and tries to remember how to be a hero.

***

_Dear Diary,_

_309 DAYS – Forgot to write more recently. Not much to report – found a moon shaped a bit like a pair of tits, which was nice._

***

The easiest stint of heroism thus far is when Rimmer is called upon to locate a derelict shuttle stranded in deep space, containing only a capsule of medical research, including the vaccine for a rare strain of moon measles that has apparently been turning children blue. With Molly on the case, tracking down the shuttle takes only days, and then only weeks to actually fly to its location. It all seems far too easy, in Rimmer’s opinion—as though perhaps there should be a ravenous death worm along the way, or at the very least an asteroid storm to circumnavigate—but alas, their escort duty back to Mimas passes, completely devoid of any drama or danger.

Of course, this is because the real danger is waiting on the airfield when they land. Even in the glimpse of the road afforded when they descended into local airspace, the spaceport is visibly thronged with crowds.

“What’s going on?” Rimmer asks. “Is there something happening? Is a celebrity going to be landing?”

“Actually, yeah,” Molly says. “Local space hero. Dashing adventurer come home for the first time in decades after pioneering interdimensional travel.”

Idiotically, Rimmer says, “Who?”

Molly rolls her eyes. “Gordon Bennett, you’re as sharp as a sausage, aren’t you? This is Ace’s dimension. The original, proper Ace.”

“Oh,” Rimmer says.

“The hero’s welcome is for you, you cretin—because they don’t know you’re a bloody imposter.”

“Ah,” Rimmer says.

Just to rub salt in the wound, Molly adds, “You know you’ll probably have to make a speech.”

“What?! Why didn’t you mention this earlier?!”

“Because you were flying a spaceship at the time, and to be frank, you seem like the sort of person who might hate public speaking, and I thought you might take us on a kamikaze dive if I told you while we were still airborne.”

That seems fair enough.

“Well, I don’t think it’s fair that I should have to make a poxy speech,” he says sulkily, “especially given that _someone_ won’t even—”

“I am not calling you Ace,” Molly cuts across.

“So, what—I get all the smeggy bits of being Ace Rimmer but I don’t get the cool bits?!” Rimmer squawks indignantly. “How is that fair?”

“You don’t get the cool bits?! Arnold, you limp cabbage, you’re flying into a massive party thrown in your honour,” Molly points out. “If that’s not a cool bit, then I don’t know what to tell you.”

Rimmer scowls.

All the same, even when Rimmer lands and climbs down from the cockpit to rapturous applause, the thought of having to make a speech is still nauseating; he is still weighing up whether he could throw himself into the engine before anyone could stop him.

Ultimately, he doesn’t kill himself, because he’s worried it might hurt a bit, and so he steps out in front of the dizzying pop and flash of a thousand camera bulbs and tries hard not to be sick on his shoes. Various stewards usher him away from _Wildfire_ and towards a press junket, threading through suited security and important-looking men speaking into earpieces.

For a moment, he is silent, standing rabbit-hearted in front of thousands as the microphone squeals into static, and then when he finally gathers the courage to speak, it comes out like this:

_“Evening, everyone!”_

(It is barely eleven AM.)

_“Arnold Rimmer, here. Glad to be home—er, where are we again? No, sorry, I’ve been here before, haven’t I? Never mind, then. I’m, er—”_ (Nervous laugh) _“I’m_ not _glad to be here!”_ (Audible gulp through the microphone) _“Just joking. A joke. Goes down much better alone in deep space.”_

(His accent keeps slipping back and forth between heroic and weaselly, like a three-legged dog on a Slip ‘N’ Slide.)

“ _Thrilled to be back. Can’t wait to rescue you again. I mean, hopefully you won’t need me to, though. So, erm. Don’t die! Or I’ll—I’ll—have to… help_.”

He knows it’s an unmitigated disaster when he sees two of the journalists in the front row exchange a perplexed glance.

“Alright, questions!” a questionable-looking man Rimmer has been assured is called Bongo claps his hands together decisively and strides out to the podium to stand alongside Rimmer. “We have time for a few questions. Anyone?”

Oh God. Rimmer is not a man particularly gifted with words—to the wall of microphones, he describes the otherworldly thrill of dimension-hopping as ‘ _not too bad’_ and being alone in deep space as being ‘ _a bit like being alone in a big high street chain coffee shop – cold and slightly unsettling’._

“Will you be settling down now that you’re home?” one newspaper wants to know, and Rimmer only says, “Erm,” before he is bowled by countless others: _What’s next for you? What are your plans? Do you have anything special lined up? Can the universe survive without your dastardly heroics? Will you marry me?_

It is getting hard to focus on the task at hand.

“Erm—not sure, don’t know, not really, hope so, and I’m spoken for,” Rimmer rattles off quickly, and discovers that this brisk response only fans the flames and garners a fresh wave of questions.

Maybe if he feigns raving, mouth-foaming insanity, people will leave him alone. Unfortunately, it’s hours before he gets any kind of reprieve—after speeches, ten-gun salutes, a ceremonial handing over of wreaths and sashes. It’s everything Rimmer has always thought he wanted, but the reality is that he squirms in the limelight like an ant under a magnifying glass and he hates every second of it.

If Lister were here, he can’t help thinking, this wouldn’t be so tedious. Lister could be irreverent and unimpressed and out of place in his leathers, and Rimmer would feel able to enjoy feeling smug about basking in praise he hasn’t earned, rather than feeling like a fraud. He could let Lister make him laugh.

Now, instead, Rimmer is standing in the middle of a lavishly furnished state room, a universally adored superhero living in the lap of luxury, clutching a champagne flute like a lifeline. Important people swill around him, discussing things he doesn’t understand and laughing loudly, and people keep touching Rimmer’s arm to get his attention, to introduce him to people and ask him the same questions again and again. It’s been so long since Rimmer occupied physical space with other living human beings that he had quite forgotten how anxious it makes him—especially now, when he is the centre of attention and everyone is forever looking over to see what he will do next.

“Excuse me,” he says to a fur-coated, pearl-throated woman in the middle of her story about… lobsters or something—“I’ve got to, erm, find the little boys’ room.”

He extricates himself from the conversation, ignoring the offended splutter of the busybodies he has left behind, and he tries to get out into the hallway before anyone else can find him. Surely there must be a coat room he can hide in, or some kind of chef’s galley with a walk-in freezer…

He dawdles at a junction in the labyrinthine corridors, and is glancing frantically in all directions for any kind of idea as to where he might go to get away from the general populace, when a familiar voice says, “Heard you would be kicking around here somewhere.”

Rimmer’s head snaps up.

He’s not imagining it—coming down the hall towards him is Lister, grinning from ear to ear. He looks more put together in a creased shirt and tie, although he’s got a narrow moustache which doesn’t suit him much, thin wire-rimmed glasses, and a wedding band.

“Lister,” he says in relief, before he can think it through—and he watches this Lister’s face crease into a frown. Smeg. Distantly, he recalls his own Lister telling him about this super successful version of himself, engineer in the Space Corps, married to Kochanski, twin boys, and his name was… bollocks, what the smeg was he—“Hammers!”

The frown deepens. Not quite, then.

“Spanners,” Lister corrects him, half-smiling, half-studying Ace as he comes in closer. He reaches towards Rimmer with one hand, but Rimmer has a horrible feeling that he’s walking into a secret-handshake-shaped trap, and so he leaves him hanging rather than expose himself. Eventually, Lister—Spanners—drops his hand to his side. “So, what, is this one of those _for you it’s been ten years, for me it’s been a thousand_ things?”

“Something like that,” Rimmer says evasively, and he can feel that he’s staring. It’s not just the moustache—his stance is off. Less cocky bravado; more quiet, self-assured, mild-mannered.

“So how does she handle, then?” Spanners asks.

“What?” Rimmer blinks. “Who?” He glances back towards the state room that he had just escaped. “I don’t know—I think we were just talking about the price of lobster.”

Spanners laughs. The sound is oddly gentle, like he’s being considerate about the volume of his voice so close to other conversations. “The ship, Ace.”

“Oh! Yes—you built her.” Rimmer is barely holding it together. He garbles something along the lines of, “Yes, very nice. Very, erm… good.”

“Still ticking over smoothly? Thank God.” Spanners crosses his arms across his chest, and that gesture is the same—hands tucked into armpits. His expression is attentive. “I’d have kicked myself if anything went wrong. I’m glad she’s okay. How’s Molly coming on?”

Rimmer lies through his teeth. “Lovely. Just lovely.”

“Really?” Spanners’ eyebrows lift. “She was a right moody cow when we first installed her. Good she’s mellowed out, then. She used to remind me a bit of Kathy.”

“Oh, yes. Kathy… yes. Good old Kathy,” Rimmer says, as vague as he can make it. Spanners give him a curious look, and Rimmer becomes aware that he has said the wrong thing. “Bloody… useless Kathy,” he amends, and—if anything—makes Spanners’ suspicion worse.

“You don’t remember Kathy,” Spanners says.

“I—er—” Rimmer’s heart is squeezing fast. “I’m—” Rationally, he knows that the most logical course of action is to lie and lie until he can leave this universe behind, but he looks into the face that looks so much like Lister’s and somehow the truth comes out. Slowly, awkwardly, he admits, “I’m… not him.”

Spanners’ chin lifts, like he’s taking the measure of Rimmer. He doesn’t say anything.

Rimmer rubs a hand over the back of his neck. “It’s sort of a long story. Dimension… stuff.” He glances guiltily back at Spanners. “I’m Rimmer, as well, but—a different one.”

Spanners lets his breath out, shaking his head. “Well,” he says, and he pushes his hands into his pockets. “You look like you could use a drink.”

Rimmer nods.

They slip away before anyone from the Admiral’s party comes outside to realise that the mighty Ace Rimmer has disappeared, and Spanners leads him through the snaking labyrinth of the Space Corps headquarters until the décor changes from being chandeliers-heavy and gold-spangled to something a lot more concrete-y. The walk is a test of Rimmer’s endurance in itself, because every single person they meet on the way—pilots in flight suits; cleaners pushing trolleys filled with grimy mop-heads; engineers, radiomen, officers, all—greet him excitedly and want to say how pleased they are to see him safely home. Rimmer nods and politely says nonsense set phrases that he’s been practicing all day like _glad you’re well_ and _take care of yourself_ and _my thoughts exactly_!

When they arrive at last at the NAAFI bar at the end of the building, Spanners takes him by the elbow and steers him towards a corner table. “You’re not technically supposed to be in here,” he tells him under his breath as he pushes him into the booth. “Less chance you’ll get pestered, though, Mr. Medal of Honour. Sit tight—I’ll get this round.” He pauses, drums one fingertip against the top of the table as though in thought. “Absinthe triple?”

Rimmer feels his stomach lift at the very idea. “Oh—erm.” He thinks if he drinks that then he will almost certainly vomit, but he doesn’t know how to decline without losing the respect of the only person he has met here who he actually wants to speak to. “Yes, sure.”

“Your face.” Spanners shakes his head. “Don’t worry—it’s a joke. Me and Ace, this one time—never mind. Wait a tick.” He pushes himself off the table and moves away across the room to the bar, and Rimmer watches him go.

All of this is almost more surreal than he can handle. By this point, he has become accustomed to meeting the Rimmer- and Lister-shaped products of alternate universes, but this is the first time that he has seen a universe actively influenced by them. This is the first time he has been with anyone—except for bloody Molly, of course—who might actually understand what he’s up against.

“There you go,” Spanner says when he returns, depositing two beers on the table between them before he sits down heavily on the bench opposite, “throw that down you.”

Rimmer just blinks at him. Another joke, or the genuine expectation that Rimmer will take the beer and drink the whole thing in one go? “Erm,” he says. “Thanks.”

“It was when we were stationed on the Kerberos Station.” Spanners pulls one of the beers back towards himself, drinks deeply and gives himself a foam moustache on top of the weird little one he’s already got. “We’d had a hell of a week—testing new FTL drives, him more battered than an old crash dummy, me trying desperately to keep him alive through the process—and on top of all that, they’d closed down the mess. Some renovations were going on after a group of hammered airmen had trashed the place, fair enough, but—I needed a pint, or five. And, uh—” Here Spanners drops his voice low, glances surreptitiously around him as though expecting to be overheard, “—Ace broke us in.”

“Ace broke the rules,” Rimmer paraphrases with a frown.

“I mean—yeah, alright, he did, but Christ, after what we’d been through? We were younger, stupider, knackered and in need of a good time. Even if that good time was just sitting in the sawdust between all these big renovation tarps and passing a bottle of absinthe back and forth. It was the only liquor we could find, see, tasted like battery acid but if you just knocked it back quick— _throw that down you_ , we kept saying to each other—then you almost didn’t taste it.”

Rimmer’s lip curls—it sounds repulsive—but when Spanners looks up, he swiftly tries hide his disdain behind his beer.

Spanners sees the look anyway, and he shakes his head with a low laugh. “I know, I know. Look, it’s not a night I’m mega proud of—not even really a night I can remember much, to be honest—but I do remember how on top of the world we felt. Creating something new, you know, all that week, breaking barriers and changing the world, even if it nearly killed us. We deserved to celebrate. Christ, we were unwell afterwards, but you can’t say we didn’t celebrate.”

There is something unspoken in his voice—quiet, wistful—that Rimmer recognises. He sets his beer down. He says, “You sound like you were close.”

“Oh, ‘course we were.” Spanners laughs into his beer. “He came up in the Space Corps when I was first training as an engineer and we hit it off right away. No matter if it was the most miserable, back-breaking day in the world, he could make it feel like an August bank holiday. Always laughing and joking. He made everything seem easy, and he made everything feel easy for the rest of us.”

“He and I have that in common,” Rimmer says, in the awkwardly jovial tones of someone trying hard to non-verbally communicate that _yes, this is a joke_ , and Spanners gives him the half-hearted huff of a pity laugh, which he supposes is better than nothing.

“So,” Spanners says, “what I want to know is—if you’re Ace now, what happened to the real one? The Ace from this dimension, I mean.”

Rimmer hesitates. “Erm. I don’t know.” He fidgets, picks nervously at a whorl in the table’s grain, scratching a tiny splinter loose. He doesn’t look at Spanners. He clears his throat and goes on delicately, “But… I’m afraid he might be—er, dead.”

Spanners’ hand grows still halfway through the action of lifting his drink. He says, “Oh,” and that says everything.

“Sorry,” Rimmer mumbles, and he lifts his own drink, as though trying to pretend that the way Spanners has frozen is a sort of very depressing cheers. “I mean, thank you. For the beer. But—sorry.”

It takes him a beat, but then Spanners seems to collect himself. “You’re alright,” he says, too offhandedly to be genuine, but he tries a smile. “I mean, we all knew it was probably gonna be a one-way trip.”

“Until I showed up.”

“Until you showed up,” Spanners amends. “Yeah, I’ll admit that gave me whiplash. Not your fault, though.”

“If it’s any consolation, I had no idea about any of… this,” Rimmer says, gesturing vaguely at their surroundings, “until I opened the cockpit door.”

Spanners nods, surprisingly understanding for a guy who just found out that his best mate has been dead for a long time. “How long have you been—” he pauses, mouth half open as he searches for the words to explain himself, “—you know. Ace, but not.”

“Three hundred and forty seven days,” Rimmer says instantly, and then hedges, “Or—so I believe. Give or take… an hour or so. But there were others before me. Lots of them. I’m just… the latest model, I suppose.”

A frown creases Spanners’ face. “So, what,” he says, “being Ace is, like… a legacy now?”

“Something like that.” Rimmer draws nervous patterns in the condensation of his beer glass with one fingernail. “An endless procession of increasingly neurotic losers pretending to be a superhero.”

For a moment, Spanners says nothing. When Rimmer looks up, he sees Spanners considering him, his face quietly contemplative, and then Spanners says, “You’re not unlike him, you know.”

Rimmer’s face screws up, incredulous. “What?”

“You and Ace. You’re more similar than you think. He hated the limelight, too. Happier with the people he knew he liked.”

Part of Rimmer wants to contest this, but he thinks of how he has laid back in bed every night for the last year or so and wished he was at home with Lister, and he concedes the point..

“That’s just depressing,” Rimmer says, instead. “He’s a hero. A god among men. Universally worshipped by men and women everywhere who either want to give him medals or give him their underwear. Or both.”

“He _was_ a hero,” Spanners corrects. “Now you are. You could be up there with the caviar and champagne—and instead you’re here with me.”

Well, smeg.

“It just…” Rimmer trails off uselessly, not knowing what he’s trying to say. “It just seems impossible. He seemed totally devoid of insecurities. He looked like he’d never had to work for anything. Like he’d never struggled with any choices or anything.”

“I saw him get nervous once, you know. He was thinking about getting a fringe cut in. It was just after he’d come back from a test run through an imploding star—he’d had an engine cut out and had to wrestle _Wildfire_ home on fumes. Said it was the most terrifying thing he’d ever done.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, he made me come with him to the barber.” Spanners grins. “The fringe looked good, though.”

Rimmer rolls his eyes. He pauses then, summoning the courage to ask what he really wants to know from Spanners. He takes a deep breath. “Do you have any advice? On how to be Ace, I mean. I can’t seem to get the confidence and charisma down. The more I try to be cocky and assertive, the more I come across like a monumental smeghead.”

“It’s not about the confidence. I mean, yeah,” Spanners concedes, with a half-laugh, “yeah, he’s cocky as anything, but it was never about that. He sees people. He always had time for everyone—he knew all the dinner ladies in the staff canteen by name, asked after their kids, asked about their day. Made getting lunch an hour-long event, but he cared. That’s the key. He could see you, see what you most wanted other people to like about you, and he made you feel good. He cared about people.”

Rimmer’s face scrunches up. “I don’t think I can do that. I only really care about one person, and I’m not even very nice to him.”

Spanners shrugs. “Practice makes perfect.”

That seems like more effort than Rimmer can be arsed with, to be honest. He wrinkles his nose. “Sounds like a lot of effort,” he grumbles.

“Well,” Spanners says, considering this, and then concedes, “Maybe it doesn’t have to be about being good all the time. But one thing I remember Ace said to me a long time ago is that it’s most important to listen to people when they’ve got nothing to say—and I reckon that’s true enough advice. It’s never steered me wrong yet, and he got along alright with it too.”

“When they’ve got nothing to say?!” Rimmer echoes dubiously. “What, so I’ll have to actually try to care about everyone’s pets and hear about their tedious bloody weekend plans?”

Spanners grins. “Hey, give it a go. Anyway—it’s your round now.” He taps an authoritative fingertip on top of his glass and gives a leading nod in the direction of the bar.

For a moment, Rimmer tries to protest— _no, he mustn’t, he really can’t_ —but then, with Spanners’ nudge, he takes it on the chin.

The concept, though, is a strange one and is still eddying round the confines of Rimmer’s skull when he manages to extricate himself from Dimension 001’s festivities and finds his way back to _Wildfire_ on his way to bed.

He pops the cockpit door and climbs inside, shutting the door behind him. Molly is off—he supposes it is quite late, for her, and she’s not expecting him back for a few days yet—and Rimmer hesitates, twisting his fingers together in the dark and silence.

“Erm,” Rimmer says at last, awkwardly. “Are you there?”

“No, I’m off in the old Mallorca holiday home.” Molly flits up onto the black screen. “What do you want now? Need your name label sewing in your PE kit? Sign a consent form for the school trip?”

Rimmer buoys himself up, takes a slow steadying breath through his teeth, and resists the urge to unplug her. If he had been alone in deep space with a thousand different iterations of the same person, he imagines he might get a bit tetchy, too. Instead, he says, “I just wanted, actually, to say thank you.”

That seems to catch her off-guard. She blinks several times in quick succession, as though she’s buffering, and then says, “You what?”

“Well, I know it can’t be easy,” Rimmer says, and avoids looking at her—after all, Spanners didn’t say he’d have to necessarily _mean it_ or anything so awful as all that, so as long as he sounds mostly sincere and says the right things, he’s got it hacked. “Doing all this, I mean. Babysitting all the Aces for million years, over and over.” He hesitates. “Getting to know them, watching them die, starting from scratch again. It can’t have been easy, and I certainly haven’t made it any easier for you, what with being, you know…” He gestures vaguely at himself and trusts that she will understand the indictment of his own general incompetence.

Molly says nothing. She stares at him, nonplussed.

“So,” Rimmer says, of the thought that she’s not overwhelmingly as grateful as Spanners had led him to anticipate. “Thank you. And…” he swallows. “I’m sorry, as well. That I’m not… him.”

Molly’s eyes narrow. “Here, who are you and what’ve you done with Arnold?”

Rimmer splutters like a badly maintained engine. “What? Nothing! No!”

“You’re being intuitive,” she accuses.

“Never! Am not!”

“Are too! You’re being _sensitive_ —stop it.”

“I’ve done nothing wrong,” Rimmer argues. “Can I help it if I’m just a warm, compassionate, empathetic sort of bloke?”

Molly scoffs. “Come off it. You’re as warm as a train station waiting room.”

“I’m not _that_ bad—”

“Remember that sandstorm on Skamandrios, when you were hiding out in that warehouse basement for the danger to pass—”

“Okay, alright, look, that was exceptional circumstances—”

“—and that pregnant woman, what was her name—Eleanor?—she asked if she could share your cheese sandwich and—”

“If you recall correctly,” Rimmer goes on, louder, “I actually had a cold-sore at the time, and I was merely _concerned_ about—”

“Oh, do us a lemon, you were just being a stingy bastard and you know it.”

Rimmer huffs. “Well, that’s the last time I try saying anything nice to you,” he tells her. “From here on out, you can just expect pure, undiluted vitriol at every waking moment.”

“Please do.”

“Alright, I will.”

He opens the cockpit door and goes to get out. He doesn’t need this verbal abuse from a computer with the compassion of a taxidermist, and he has a luxurious, feather-down bed waiting for him back inside— _and_ he’s been told that he can help himself to anything he likes from the mini-fridge, free of charge.

However, as he stands to climb down, Molly says, “Hang on—Arnold—”

“What now?” he says crossly, scowling at her over his shoulder.

On the screen, Molly looks nearly as hacked off as he does, her red mouth pursed and annoyed, and when she does speak, it’s as though the words are being pulled out of her with pliers. She says, “Thank you. That means a lot.”

Rimmer pauses, one hand braced on _Wildfire’s_ roof. Spanners hadn’t really told him what to do when he got this far; he doesn’t know how to respond now. He gives an awkward sort of nod, and says, “Sure.”

“Now piss off, then,” Molly says, “and think about what you’ve done. Don’t come back ‘til you’re ready to be a prick again.”

With a short laugh, Rimmer hops down from _Wildfire._ As he reaches up to close the cockpit door, he says, “Not to worry—being a prick is something of a speciality of mine.”

***

_Dear Diary,_

_476 DAYS. The truth is that actually I don’t miss Lister. Not at all! Not one smegging bit. Anyway—there’s hardly much to miss, is there? Dave Lister: rude, lazy, disrespectful, boorish, utterly disgusting. The brains of a rhubarb crumble and the work ethic of Michelangelo’s David, although admittedly at least somewhat better endowed. A man with the personal hygiene of an embalmed corpse and the kerb appeal of a Tube station toilet._ _Honestly, I’m not missing anything._

_There are other things, though, of course. Silly, stupid things. Like his infuriating optimism. His kindness, most of the time. He’s terribly loyal. Smegging stubborn, with his stupid ideals—his stupid, idiotic, noble ideals. His poxy determination to help, to fix things, fix people. His resourcefulness. Sometimes,_ sometimes _, only SOMETIMES, he could trick you into thinking he might be quite clever… though he isn’t, obviously. His sturdy hands. His infectious grin. The way he could make me laugh sometimes. The way he would drive me absolutely barmy,_ always _._

_No, I’m not missing anything. Not in the slightest. Not in the least._

***

Rimmer thinks he is getting the hang of the character. He speaks as though he has a sore throat; he gives pet names to everyone, in spite of how unnaturally it comes to him, resulting in a mixed reception to monikers like _dear cabbage_ and _old gent_ ; he sort of tilts his hips forwards when he walks like a fearless cowboy and he ignores how it makes him feel uncomfortably like he’s coming at people cock-first. The thing that still gives him figurative blisters is the job itself—being a hero, it transpires, is really, truly _crap._

A stint on guard duty in the rain, being shot at by lunatics, constantly endangering his own life for the greater smegging good… it’s exhausting, and a great amount of good it’s going to do for Rimmer if he winds up dead for the greater good.

He squares up to tyrants and gets imprisoned for his troubles; he only escapes execution by virtue of the fact that while he is snivelling at the scaffold, the guillotine blade just sort of clonks uselessly off the back of his neck, and he manages to slip away in the ensuing chaos with no more than a bruise.

Sometimes he’s risking his neck—literally—for some drippy, useless damsel in distress, sometimes for a city on the brink of complete social collapse, sometimes for life as we know it. Sometimes, just sometimes, he is throwing his life on the line for an all-too familiar batch of morons.

There’s a certain strange comfort to be had, Rimmer thinks, on the occasions where _Wildfire’s_ dimension drive takes him hurtling back to _Red Dwarf_. There are constants he can rely on—that the hand towels in the men’s loos will be just slightly too flimsy; that he’ll have to jab the button for the lift three or four times with increasing aggression before any sign of a lift materialises; that the skutters will be prone to running over his feet; that Lister will be there.

The others are less reliable. In some universes, they never rescued Kryten, while in others Lister’s stupid smuggled-aboard moggy will evolve down a different path, eating its own young for generations until it becomes a bloodthirsty slathering cannibalistic nightmare, or it will die in the vents before survival of the fittest can so much as glance at its gym gear—but Rimmer has not yet encountered a Lister-less reality.

Of course, that’s not to say that he’s always the same. Every universe’s Lister has his own unique flavouring, a decision made differently somewhere along the line, or the knock-on effect of someone else’s decision. He’s heavier, more broad-chested; he’s a stickler for the rules; he’s actually good at the guitar, and reluctant to play in front of others; he’s smaller, sans Adam’s apple, but as arsey as ever; he’s nearly six foot tall or he’s a titch and he’s overcompensating; he’s softly spoken or he’s a pain in the arse or he’s effortlessly charming.

In one universe, Rimmer insults him and he only blinks back, looking bewildered, and Rimmer almost feels bad; in another, Rimmer tries to be nice, thanks him for his help, and gets told, _yeah, no thanks to you, couldn’t hit water if you fell out of a boat_ —apropos of exactly nothing. Rimmer tries to keep up the good-natured grace and composure expected of him as Ace, but Lister pushes him to his limits. They argue constantly.

That’s one constant. That, and the fact that Lister will always, unfailingly help him.

Even in the realities where Rimmer is accidentally a bit of a prick, or the ones where he is deliberately a bit of a prick, or the realities where Rimmer royally cocks everything up and sends them spiralling at high-speed towards catastrophe, Lister—with varying degrees of enthusiasm—will come to pick up the pieces with him. He’ll do what is needed, which is not precisely the same as doing what he’s _told_ , and sometimes he’ll check that Rimmer is alright. Sometimes he’ll cover for Rimmer, keep an embarrassing mistake secret from the others, with a wink or a rueful look or a raised eyebrow as though to say, _you owe me for this one._ Sometimes he’ll make Rimmer laugh. Sometimes he’ll smile and Rimmer’s internal organs will squeeze fitfully with the urge to reach for him.

It does raise an ethical question, however.

Rimmer turns the dilemma over and over in his head before he resigns himself to asking Molly, and he waits until they are deep, deep into deepest space, with nowhere for Molly to escape (once he asked her to explain Bernoulli’s principle when they were docked at a research station and she somehow found a way to project herself into another computer on the other side of the moon), and then he goes for it.

Out of nowhere, Rimmer opens with, “I have an ethical question.”

“Oh, Christ,” Molly says. “Now what?”

There is no delicate way to say this. Rimmer steeples his fingers thoughtfully. “If you make love to your partner in an alternate universe, is that cheating?” he asks.

For a moment, Molly is silent, staring at him. “What?”

“I mean, if it’s them,” Rimmer explains, “but them from another dimension—is that being unfaithful?”

“Yes,” Molly says decisively.

Rimmer frowns. He was expecting some sort of a debate, a back-and-forth riposte, or at the very least some due consideration of both perspectives. “That was fast.”

“Well, it’s a no-brainer, innit?”

“Well, not really,” Rimmer argues. “It’s still the same person. How is that cheating?”

“But you’re sticking your bits in someone else. Or, er—” Molly’s eyes flick critically over him, up and down. “Or receiving someone else’s bits—whatever’s your poison.”

Rimmer resents that implication. He decides to ignore it and persists instead: “But they’re _not_ someone else.”

“Think about it this way—will they remember it?” Molly points out. “Or when you go, _oh, I had a great time last night, that were amazing_ and they go, _hang about, I wasn’t even here yesterday—_ will they see that as being shagged, or not being shagged?”

Rimmer glowers. Unsurprisingly, this is not the answer that he wanted.

It’s not as though he’s raring to sample all the Listers that reality has to offer… it’s just that, historically speaking, Lister is the only person he has ever had any degree of real success with, in that department, and he seems as good a bet as any for Rimmer getting his end away. It’s been _eons_ , and last week he got turned on looking at a particularly curvaceous asteroid.

“So, what, are you getting homesick already?” Molly asks, her voice more contemptuous than Rimmer thinks he deserves. “You’ve barely been gone a year. That’s less than some nitwits spend on gallivanting round South-East Asia trying to find themselves. You’re one hiking holiday in Nepal away from home and you’re already desperate to jump into infidelity.”

“I wasn’t going to _jump into infidelity_ , thank you very much,” Rimmer retorts. “I was probably going to lie down first.”

Molly rolls her eyes. “Go on, then. Who is she?”

“Who?”

“The girl back home, you cretin.”

Rimmer opens his mouth and nothing comes out. He doesn’t know why this is so difficult—perhaps because he is deadly allergic to any kind of tenderness, because he likes to express his affection for people by telling them off and making them fill in arbitrary paperwork, because he is so used to everyone in his life already _knowing_ that he’s never had to actually say it before.

“Oh, what, is it a big secret?” Molly says sarcastically. “You worried I’m gonna go round blabbing to the rest of deep space? Tell you what, next time I head over to the Weekly Dimension-Hopping Ship Computer Conference, I’ll keep this little tidbit off the record, just to honour your privacy.”

Rimmer fiddles for a moment with the dashboard controls, stalling for time. Then, at last, he says, “His name is Lister.”

“Oh.”

Rimmer hates the weight of that one syllable. He feels it needs explaining, even though rationally he knows that it’s not necessary for him to justify himself. “My bunkmate—and subordinate. My friend, mostly,” he says, which is not strictly true. He amends, “Sometimes. We got on each other’s nerves a lot. Always his fault, obviously.”

“Obviously,” Molly says drily.

“He’s disgusting. A grubby, grotty, good-for-nothing lazybones with the work ethic of roadkill and the table manners of Genghis Khan. He could make a cockroach feel self-conscious about its personal hygiene—his socks were a particular biohazard.”

“Sounds like a charmer,” Molly comments.

Rimmer doesn’t answer—because Lister _is_ charming, in his own way. Courageous to the point of stupidity, more kindness than sense, funny in spite of being deliberately, provocatively intolerable, gentle without trying. Unbearably handsome, too. Rimmer says none of this, however. He doesn’t know what his voice will sound like when he admits that he misses him terribly.

“I do remember who Lister is, actually,” Molly admits after a moment. “Well—I’ve known a fair few of them. They’re different every time, so I don’t know yours, but. There’s usually a decent bit of overlap, common features, I mean. Bad breath, for one thing.”

With a laugh huffed through his nose, Rimmer says, “Yep.”

“Fan of curries?”

“Big-time.”

“Total disregard for his own safety?”

“Absolutely.”

“Left-handed?”

Rimmer pulls a face, surprised. “Mine was right-handed,” he says, and there’s only a momentary flush of embarrassment at calling him _mine,_ but it seems a bit late to be quibbling the small stuff. Besides, it’s not as though anyone else is ever going to find out. It’s not as though he’s going to see Lister any time soon and give him the opportunity to take the piss out of Rimmer being soppy.

“Oh, that’s a first!” Molly seems genuinely quite interested in this information. “Did yours have webbed fingers, too?”

“No, he—wait—” Rimmer recoils. “Webbed— _what?!_ ”

“Only joking.”

Rimmer shakes his head. “Anyway,” he says after a beat, “surely I can’t be the only one who shacked up with him. Or—” He frowns, not sure he likes the implication of that. “Or at least, not the only version of me who got with a version of him.”

“Oh, absolutely not,” Molly says. “I think you’ve got about a seventy-nine percent probability.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Rimmer says blankly.

Molly clicks her tongue, impatient and disdainful. “Smeg’s sake—not the most common, but it’s up there. Is that better, or do you need me to draw you a diagram with some pictures?”

Rimmer isn’t sure whether or not he is happy with this answer. The idea of being somehow intrinsically tied to Lister across time and space is a daunting one; the idea that loving Lister is an option as random as any other spontaneously plucked from a cosmic hat is distressing in a different way.

“Then again, I suppose it makes sense, really. After all, Ace and Spanners were the blueprint.”

At first, Rimmer only hums a disinterested agreement, but then her words sink in and he jerks back in his seat. “Wait—what? Ace and Spanners?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Ace and Spanners,” Rimmer repeats, just to be certain. “As in Ace Rimmer and Lister Spanners. That Ace and Spanners.”

“You make him sound like an aisle in Wickes. You do realise Spanners is just a nickname, right? Like how your name is Arnold but most people just call you a twat.”

Rimmer blinks, stuttering past this, and comes out the other side with, “But Spanners is married. To a woman. To the Kochanski woman, specifically.”

“Cor, you’re a bright spark, aren’t you?” Molly tuts. “Obviously it didn’t last, did it? To be honest, I think it was mostly a sort of off again, on again type thing.”

Rimmer is still trying to process the very idea. It doesn’t make any sense, because when he met Spanners only a few universes ago, he wasn’t exactly—okay, so he was a little—but only at first, when he thought that—oh, alright, actually—yes, fine, he sees it now. “But… when? Why? And—” he hesitates, knowing that he shouldn’t ask but also aware that the answer is something he needs. “Why did it end?”

Molly huffs her breath, ruffling her fringe upwards. “I mean, Ace didn’t get into the sordid details, but what I gathered from it was that Ace loved being a hero and Spanners didn’t much love waiting for him to come home.”

A year ago, if you’d asked Rimmer to choose between love and glory, he’d have said it was a dead cert. Now, he’s not so sure.

“So,” Molly says. “There you have it. Not totally unlike the old Ace. But then again, he didn’t fixate on trying to pull different versions of his missus across ten thousand different realities, so hey-ho.” Molly shrugs. “You must be an old romantic at heart.”

“You take that back,” Rimmer threatens.

Molly cocks an eyebrow. “Or what? You’ll write me a poem?”

Rimmer glares at her.

***

_Dear Diary,_

_552 DAYS – Had a bit of an issue with a sprained wrist and it was simply impossible to log events in this journal. Molly was a thoroughly unsympathetic cow, saying stupid things like how it’s “impossible to sprain a hardlight hologram’s wrist” but she hasn’t got a medical degree so I might as well ask the wallpaper. It does hurt awfully. I feel like I deserve a little holiday… chance would be a fine thing._

***

_Red Dwarf_ is dead in the water and drifting. They’ve been without electricity, without heat, for nearly a week. The ship is losing all its residual heat. If they carry on like this, they will freeze to death.

“Call it controversial—and forgive me if you’ve had a go at this one already—but have you tried giving it a kick?”

Hollister looks blankly at him. “Giving it a kick,” he repeats.

“Yes,” Rimmer says.

“The hydrogen fusion reactor,” Hollister says, to clarify. “You want me to kick it.”

Well, when he puts it like _that_ it does seem a bit silly. Rimmer hesitates, casting about for an alternate suggestion. “Or maybe—maybe it’s… run out… of hydrogen?”

Hollister’s eyes narrow. “Are you _sure_ you’re not just our Rimmer in a wig?”

Rimmer swallows. “Quite sure. I’m an entirely different person, I assure you.”

Herein lies part of the problem in being Ace. It transpires that most of the time, it’s not enough to just rock up looking rugged and daring; most of the time he also has to actually figure out what to _do,_ and the problem with that is that Rimmer knows nothing about nothing, as Lister has generously put it on countless occasions.

_Quick, help us,_ the people cry out in need. _The thingamabob-coagulation circuit has ameliorated our adjacent ectomorphic ports—_ or something—and there Rimmer is, already hopelessly lost at the word ‘ _the’_.

“—so,” Hollister says, at the tail-end of a long monologue that Rimmer has not been paying anywhere near as much attention to as he should’ve been, “does that sound like something you could handle?”

“What? Oh—erm, yes, absolutely.” Rimmer snaps to attention, lifts his hand as though about to salute—and then remembers that he is not Rimmer, he’s Ace, and then at the last second swings the hand round to smooth over his hair instead. “Indeed. I’ll have it fixed up before you can say _Bob’s your uncle._ ”

Hollister looks distinctly unconvinced. “Right,” he says. He shakes his head minutely, with a short sigh, like he’s resigning himself to something unpleasant, and then tilts his head over to look past Rimmer in the direction of the drive room door. “Lister, could you give us a hand here?”

And there he is, unwashed, unkempt, somewhat bleary-eyed with a tell-tale hangover. Christ, this must be before the Cadmium accident—or at least, adjacent to that time—because this Lister looks younger than Rimmer has seen him in years, all round cheeks, ears as cigarette holders, a crease down one side of his face like he’s fallen asleep on something weirdly and only just woken up. One of his locs is wet, trailing what smells like lager down the front of his top, and for a moment, Lister just squints at Hollister as though he has no idea who he is.

“Yeah, sure,” he says. “No problem, uh…” He trails off, looking to Rimmer as though for a clue, and is resolutely not offered one.

“Sir?” Hollister prompts, heavy with sarcasm.

“There’s no need to call me sir, captain,” Lister says.

Hollister narrows his eyes threateningly. “Watch it, Lister.”

“Will do,” Lister says, sounding either completely unfazed or just oblivious to the threat. “What you after, then?”

“Take Mr. Rimmer here down to the engineering decks, get him introduced to H-Shift, and I’ll be joining you shortly. In the meantime,” Hollister says, turning to Rimmer, “in your infinite wisdom, maybe you can take a look under the hood and see what you can spot to get us out of this mess, huh, Ace?”

Rimmer gulps. “Yes. Indeed.” He looks over to Lister, of the thought that perhaps now Lister will question who Rimmer is, why he’s here, what’s going on, and—nope. He is staring across the drive room with a thumb up his nose to scratch some deep, deep itch.

On the way down, he and Lister walk in silence until they reach the lifts, where Lister jabs the button violently and then, in the ensuing pause while they wait for the lift to actually show up, says conversationally, “So did I miss the memo about fancy dress Friday, or are you working through something right now?”

“What?” Rimmer looks across, startled, and Lister raises his eyebrows, his gaze flicking pointedly down to Rimmer’s attire. “Oh—no, I’m just—I’m—”

Actually, Rimmer doesn’t have an answer for that. He doesn’t really know why he’s wearing this outfit, other than the fact that he was always under the impression he sort of had to.

“I mean,” Rimmer stammers, and then it strikes him. “Hang on—you do know I’m not Rimmer, don’t you?”

Lister’s expression becomes ever more incredulous. “Yeah, no, I know,” he says slowly. “You’re, what—Priscilla Queen of the Desert now?”

“No, really,” Rimmer insists, as the lift doors open and he follows Lister in. “I’m from a different dimension. I’m a superhero who jumps through time and different realities to save the day.”

Lister snorts. “Alright.”

As the lift descends the thousand-odd floors to the engineering decks, Lister retrieves a cigarette from the brim of his hat and lights up—right underneath the ‘No Smoking’ sign!

“Do you mind?” Rimmer says irritably, flapping wisps of smoke away from his face. “That’s prohibited in here, Lister, put it out.”

“Or what?” Lister asks. “You’ll fry me alive with your multi-reality super laser power, will you?”

“I haven’t got any superpowers,” Rimmer retorts. “That doesn’t give you an excuse to break the rules, though.”

Lister clicks his tongue in disapproval, shaking his head. “Oh, Rimmer,” he says. “Not much of a superhero, are you?” He plucks the cigarette from his mouth, considers it for a moment, and then blows Rimmer a kiss in a plume of grey smoke.

Rimmer splutters indignantly, but before he can start in on Lister for being rude, disrespectful, and irresponsible—for a start—the lift dings and the doors slide open.

Lister leads the way onto the engineering deck, moving at a pace that Rimmer would characterise as a purposeful slouch, and Rimmer hurries briskly behind him. He soon wishes he hadn’t, because it means he has front row seats when Lister calls across to his mates, “Oi, I got Flash Gordon here wants a look at your pipes.”

“Lister!” Rimmer hisses. “No, I—”

“Steady on, get us a drink first,” Selby laughs in return.

“And it’s _Ace_ , actually,” Rimmer tries to say, but he can’t be heard over the idiotic braying laughter and the sound, infuriatingly, of wolf-whistling.

“Go on, give us a twirl, Rimmer.”

“Does it come off like a Chippendale’s?”

“Lister, I said I didn’t want another kissogram this year—”

“Hey, shut up a minute, will you?” Lister cuts across, but the lazy grin spread across his face suggests that he is enjoying this far, far too much. “He’s from outer space—”

“Is he fuck.”

“Actually, no, I can believe that one.”

“—and he’s here to help.”

“Why—is there a test needs failing somewhere?”

Rimmer would quite like to disembowel the lot of them.

On the whole, the engineering team look largely unimpressed, and Rimmer is already feeling very cross and deeply unwilling to help. It isn’t fair—he isn’t even being a twat this time, really, he’s genuinely trying to be a nice Ace, but here he is anyway, getting off at Goit Central on the Gimboid Line and being made a mockery of. No, they can all rot in deep space for all he cares, except for the fact that he doesn’t think Molly will let him so much as turn the key in _Wildfire’s_ ignition if he hasn’t faffed about doing something for the greater smegging good.

Doesn’t mean Rimmer’s _happy_ about it, though.

Going into this, Rimmer had hoped that he would take a look at the engine and just sort of understand instinctively what needed to be repaired… but as he goes deeper into the engine room with Lister and his grotty little mates, he becomes increasingly aware that he doesn’t have the scoobiest. What’s more, it’s increasingly difficult to concentrate when at least eighty per cent of his focusing power is being spent on Lister and the fact that he doesn’t believe a word that Rimmer says.

Example the first: Rimmer pulls from the pocket of his flight suit a small digital thermometer that he has got in the habit of carrying around ever since that one incident on Calypso where he singlehandedly identified the source of the new Decumanidis Epidemic and helped to quarantine Patient Zero before it spread any further—and as soon as he gets it out, he finds himself needing to defend the decision from an incredibly scornful Lister who only wants to make fun of him.

“It’s a perfectly sensible thing to carry around!” Rimmer argues. “You never know when you’re going to need to treat an outbreak of space cholera, and I’d rather be prepared than caught with my trousers down.”

“Yeah, God forbid.” Lister grimaces. “I still remember last New Year’s do, seeing you caught with your trousers down—a sight to give anyone nightmares.”

Rimmer splutters indignantly. “I—that’s not _me_ ,” he protests. “You’ve never seen my—my—well. A version of you—that’s not important. But the point is—”

“Oh, right, yeah,” Lister says, voice heavy with sarcasm, and he rolls his eyes so hard that his whole body turns with the motion, his arms hanging heavy at his sides like his strings have been cut. “Yeah, of course, ‘cause you’re not Rimmer, are you? You’re… you’re Buzz smegging Lightyear, aren’t you?”

“Ace,” Rimmer grits out through his teeth, “Rimmer. Actually.”

“Yeah, yeah, that’s what I said. ‘Cause you’re not Rimmer. You’re a space hero, right.”

“But it’s _true_ ,” Rimmer insists. “I’m not your Rimmer—I’m a completely different person. Can you not tell?”

“What am I supposed to notice that’s different?”

“I don’t know—I haven’t met your Rimmer. Does he look like me?”

Lister looks at him in open disbelief. “Now you mention it, actually, yeah, he does a bit.”

“No, I mean—well, obviously we look mostly the same—but what about little things? Like—like—” Rimmer flounders for a subtle, yet obvious difference. “Eye colour, maybe. Or the scar—does he have the same scar? Or, or, or, his mannerisms—”

“Rimmer, no offense, but how much time do you think I spend studying your smegging mannerisms?” Lister asks.

He says, _no offense,_ but Rimmer feels quite offended. He wants to say, _well, I can always tell the difference between my Lister and all you stupid idiotic imposters,_ but he feels that is saying too much and what’s more, it won’t prove anything to this Lister except that Rimmer is slightly obsessed with him.

It’s not worth it. Rimmer huffs his breath and turns his attention back to inspecting the reactor’s water reservoir, and resigns himself sourly to the fact that clearly Lister is not going to believe him about this.

There is nothing to do, then, other than try to fix the sodding ship and get out of her as soon as possible, before Rimmer loses his temper and flushes Lister out into space.

He stalks off on his own, ears burning at the sound of the shrieking laughter behind him of Lister and his stupid, idiotic, mouth-breathing cronies, and he tries to dissuade himself from the increasingly tempting urge to just blow up the whole ship. Rimmer is hardlight; he’d probably survive. Yes, by consequence, a thousand or so innocent people would perish, but then again, he’s done that once before and only lost a very marginal amount of sleep. He highly doubts that a repeat of the same incident will traumatise him to any greater degree.

As he sulks around the back of the engine reactor, trying and failing to talk himself down from the notion of mass murder out of pure inconvenience, he spots something that he had not previously noticed. Something that, in fact, no-one has noticed.

Behind the reactor, behind all the complicated tubing and funnels and valves, there are regulators that run on a back-up generator—so that, in the case of a reactor failure, the regulator is not depending on the reactor to boot back up, but can restart the cycle using power drawn from a solar battery.

There is the solar battery. There is the cable; there is the plug; there is the laminated sheet of A4 on which has been printed, in forty-eight point Times New Roman DO NOT UNPLUG UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, VITAL TO SHIP RUNNING.

However, it is not plugged in.

For a long moment, Rimmer merely stares at the offending plug.

Surely… surely it cannot be so simple. He was nearly laughed out of the drive room for suggesting that they give the hydrogen reactor a good kick to get it started again; _surely,_ it cannot be a solution even simpler than that. _Surely,_ someone would have already checked to see that the smegging thing was plugged in.

Rimmer wanders over, crouches down to fit himself into the space beside the solar battery, wiggles his arm into the narrow gap, and plugs the battery in.

There is a momentary silence, and then there is a dimly flashing orange light that appears, and slowly… the whirring of the reactor starts up again. Rimmer hastily crawls out backwards—tries to stand up too soon, twats the back of his head off the engine—hauls himself out, trips over a stray cable—flings out a hand to steady himself, touches the reactor shell—burns his hand—and then as he is staggering, swearing, shaking out his stinging fingers, he comes face to face with Lister and the other Flintstones.

“There’s no way,” Selby says, straight off the bat, his mouth slack and gormless. “There’s no way he did that.”

Rimmer draws himself up tall, one hand balled into a fist to try and crush the pain into submission.

“What did you just do?” Lister demands, eyes narrowed in suspicion.

Rimmer clears his throat. “Never you mind,” he says loftily, and straightens his flight suit. “All that you need to know is that the problem… has been fixed.”

“You’ve not done that,” Lister says loudly. “Not a chance. You’ve… how’ve you done that?”

Rimmer gives Lister a mild, condescending smile. “Don’t worry. I’ll tell you when you’re older.”

Lister folds his arms across his chest and tells him to do something absolutely foul and possibly illegal—not to mention impossible, at least when they’re in deep space and thousands of light-years from the nearest aquarium—and Rimmer considers that a job very well done.

Briskly dusting his hands off, Rimmer turns on his heels and saunters off back in the direction of the drive room. For a moment, there is no sound of Lister following him, although he can hear the dulcet tones of Lister muttering angrily to his friends, and then—sure enough—Lister’s delicate, ethereal tread comes pounding up the metal stairs behind him to catch up.

“You’re having me on,” Lister says, without any preamble. “You didn’t just fix that yourself.”

“Oh, but I did, Listy.”

“What did you do?”

“Don’t you worry your little head about it.”

“I swear to God, Rimmer, tell me or I’ll take a shit in your pillowcase again.”

“Again?! Lister, that’s—you know what? That doesn’t make a blind bit of difference to me, actually.”

Lister’s nose wrinkles. “Really?”

“Of course!” Rimmer says airily, as they reach the top of the stairs and start heading out into the hallway towards the lifts. “Makes no difference to me at all, seeing as it isn’t my bed.”

“Right, right.” Lister rolls his eyes. “Of course.”

“Well, I’ll let you deliver the good news to Hollister,” Rimmer says, feeling benevolent. “I can’t hang around saving your neck all day.”

“Cheers,” Lister says, still suspicious.

“Well,” Rimmer starts, turning to face him before they separate—Lister to the drive-room, Rimmer to the airlock. “It’s been a…” _Pleasure?_ He clears his throat— “day. See you around.”

Lister folds his arms across his chest. “What, will you not be in the bottom bunk tonight, like? Jackpot.”

“I told you already, I won’t be here at all—I’ll be in a different universe, probably.”

Lister shrugs. “Hey, so long as I get to bash one out in smegging privacy and not have to listen to your stupid discs, I’m not fussed where you go.”

There is no reasoning with him. Rimmer rolls his eyes. “Bye,” he says pointedly, and then he heads for the airlock.

“Yeah, yeah, see you, Rimmer,” Lister says from behind him, and then there is another voice—

“What is it _now_ , Lister?”

Rimmer knows those dulcet, melodious tones. He looks back over his shoulder to see a figure down the far end of the corridor—tall, slim, wild-haired, wearing khakis and a scowl—and, better still, to see the expression of absolute bewilderment on Lister’s face.

Lister doesn’t even manage to get the words out, stuck at “Wh—” as his head whips back and forth between the two Rimmers like a spaniel watching Wimbledon, and Rimmer can’t deny the thrill of vindictive glee that he feels.

“Well, cheerio, Listy!” he calls back cheerily, twirls off a brisk JMC salute, and climbs back through the airlock with a thoroughly self-satisfied smirk.

***

“Nothing for it, Arnold, you’re gonna have to shoot it down.”

“With what?” Rimmer shrieks. “What do you want me to do, chuck some balled-up old socks at it?”

“I mean, yeah, or at a pinch you could use the thermal cannons,” Molly says.

Rimmer blinks. “The—how long have we been keeping those quiet?!”

“I thought you’d read the old Ace manual!”

Rimmer hesitates. “I read the York Notes.”

“You useless—”

“Alright, okay, alright!” Rimmer bursts out and starts fumbling frantically in the glove compartment to try and teach himself how to be an incredible fighter pilot in under ten minutes. It’d be a mean feat for anyone, but for Rimmer, who has been known to spend days staring at a revision crib sheet and retain nothing, it seems more or less impossible.

“Any second now, Arn,” Molly urges.

“Give me a minute,” Rimmer mutters, sliding his fingertip along the lines as he scans. “Cannon… cannon…”

“We haven’t got a minute!”

“I said just _hang on_!”

“You didn’t, but suit yourself,” Molly says. “No rush. The fate of all humanity is in your greasy, moist little hands, but take your time. Christ, I might as well have asked 759.”

“Oh, that prick can smeg right off,” Rimmer snaps, temper rising, and he decides—well, if you can’t live dangerously when wielding a thermal cannon, when can you? He snaps the manual shut, grits his teeth, and fires.

***

_Dear Diary,_

_702 DAYS – Ingrowing toenail causing trouble again. My clippers have gone blunt and I don’t exactly know where to acquire a new pair. I can hardly fly into peril going,_ Fear not, everyone, I’m Ace Rimmer and I’m here to save the day, and incidentally, has anyone got a pedicure set on hand? I’ve got a toenail with a death warrant. _Maybe the Ace boots are too small. After all, you know what they say about big feet._

_***_

They are homing in on an SOS signal in the next solar system, Dimension 415, and when they pull out of FTL to scan for greater detail, Rimmer’s stomach lifts in nervous anticipation. He doesn’t need to engage the scanner to find out what they’re flying towards—just from the initial readings, he knows: it’s a Class II JMC ship-to-surface transport vehicle, fitted with only minor defensive weapons and a hyperdrive only capable of short bursts of speed, with one working indicator and an engine that needs a kick before it splutters to life. It’s _Starbug_.

“Christ alive, here we go again,” Molly mutters. “Right, have you scrubbed up this time?”

Rimmer ignores her and hails them. His pulse flutters fast in his ears and he tries not to think about what is waiting for him when he reaches them in forty minutes or so. He focuses on not crashing the ship. He gets into character. Confident, charismatic, self-assured and sexually desirable.

He thinks he could pull off maybe one of those, with a stroke of luck.

Once _Wildfire_ docks alongside, Rimmer doesn’t allow himself time to overthink it. He zips up the jacket of his flight suit, takes a deep breath, and heads inside.

Rimmer steps through the _Starbug_ airlock and storms round the corner before he can work himself up into a tizzy. “Evening, gents,” he says, too loudly—his voice echoes off the metal and makes him flinch—and he sets his hands on his hips. “What seems to be the kerfuffle?”

Across the midsection, there is a slowly spreading pool of thick black oil, which answers Rimmer’s first question. He hasn’t yet got to his second, unspoken question, but that is promptly answered because there, kneeling with their backs to him, are two figures at work. One is the Cat, and one, again, is Lister.

At Rimmer’s voice, both look over their shoulders. The Cat probably looks mostly the same—to be honest, he’s not the one Rimmer is paying attention to. Lister stands, jerkily as though by impulse or pulled by a string, and he turns around to face him.

He’s a little taller than Rimmer remembers, a little heavier. The scrap of ribbon he knots around his locs is orange and frayed at the end. He has a cigarette tucked behind his ear; he wears scruffy, threadbare jeans and his boots are unlaced. He takes off his ugly squashed hat, like he’s some smegging Victorian gentleman, and when he smiles, he has a narrow gap between his front teeth, and Rimmer absolutely hates how charming he is before he’s even opened his mouth.

“Oh—hey. This is a surprise,” Lister says, and his voice is actually _warm,_ which isn’t the reception that Rimmer was expecting, to be honest. “What’s a nice guy like you doing in a swamp like this?”

“Eurgh,” the Cat says.

Rimmer isn’t entirely sure what’s happening. Lister is being nice to him, right off the bat. No insults, no provocative comments designed to start a fight, nothing. He speaks with the same gentle, easy cadence that his own Lister does when they’re not trying to kill each other—light-hearted, flirtatious, even. But this isn’t his Lister, and Rimmer feels somewhat disoriented by it. He knows he’s come in here all confident and heroic, and now he can’t think what he’s supposed to do next.

His brain goes blank, and so the first thing he thinks to say, absently, is, “You couldn’t pull a rotten tooth out of a dead horse’s head with that one.”

Lister laughs. “Say what you really think, man.” He doesn’t seem offended; on the contrary, his smile only widens. It’s not unlike standing under a searchlight, being the sole focus of Lister at his most aggressively endearing. “That’s alright—I’ve got more.”

There is an unsteady warmth prickling under Rimmer’s jaw and that’s just what he needs, going red now on top of everything else. He clears his throat and looks at the Cat instead.

“Right,” he says, trying to sound officious. “It looks like you’re in trouble and I’m here to help. What’s gone wrong?”

It’s Lister who answers, and so Rimmer looks reluctantly over. “Geomagnetic storm.” Lister wipes the back of his hand across his forehead, leaving a smear of grease over one eyebrow. “Took out all our electrics for twenty minutes, fried our radar, and when we came back online, coolant was leaking everywhere.”

Rimmer’s eyebrows lift as he takes in the puddle of liquid seeping across more or less every inch of _Starbug’s_ midsection floor. “This is all coolant?” he asks incredulously, horrified.

“What?” Lister frowns. “Oh, no. Let’s just say that _someone_ wanted to move the spare fuel for the back-up generator and then got distracted by his reflection in the lid of the drum.”

“Hey!” the Cat sits up, indignant, and he appeals to Rimmer. “Did you not just hear him say that the electrics were out for _twenty minutes_? Twenty minutes since I’d checked a mirror. I didn’t know what was going on—I didn’t know whether I was gorgeous or not, and well—look at me.” He gestures, sweeping the length of his body, and points one toe.

“So…” Rimmer lifts one foot carefully, watching the fuel drip from the toe of his boot. “Still a horrifying, disastrously flammable mess—just in a slightly different way.”

“Yeah.” Lister grins. “Fancy a ciggie?”

“Absolutely not.” Rimmer looks around him, glancing into the cockpit—empty—and in the different of the stairs up into the habitation deck. “And where’s the rest of your crew?”

“We’ve got Kryten—he’s a mechanoid—down in the engines trying to wrangle the radar, but that’s it.”

Rimmer frowns. “That’s it?”

Lister looks at him, puzzled. “Yeah, that’s it.”

“No-one else?” Rimmer checks.

“No.”

“You’re not forgetting anyone?” Rimmer double-checks.

“Don’t think so.”

“No-one else onboard,” Rimmer triple-checks.

“Just me and the Cat and Kryten. Why?”

Smeg.

Rimmer’s mouth opens and closes uselessly. “I—I—no reason, really, I just—it’s a big-ish ship, you know, for a small crew,” he excuses himself, but his head is spinning.

No Rimmer.

He can’t _not exist_ —that makes no sense, not least because surely that alternate universe wouldn’t be possible for him to visit. No, this must be a universe where the alternate Rimmer made some decision along the line to take him on a different path, a path away from _Red Dwarf_ , away from Lister. This is a Lister who has never met any version of Rimmer. This is Lister’s instinctive reaction to him, uncoloured by his perceptions of Rimmer as a pompous, arrogant, self-centred wanker.

Oh, God. Lister is going to try and fuck him.

The midsection of _Starbug_ is getting very hot, Rimmer reflects, tugging at the collar of his flight suit. “Right. Okay.” He clears his throat again. “So, here’s what I propose—”

“Steady on,” Lister teases. “Buy us dinner first.”

This is going to be difficult.

“I suggest,” Rimmer starts again, looking at the Cat and _only_ at the Cat, “that we head down to join Kryten and prioritise fixing the radar. That way, we can at least clean up this mess safe in the knowledge that we’re not about to be hit in the face by anything else. Then we can double back and fix this fuel issue at the source.”

“Hey, I don’t know what you’re looking at me for,” the Cat protests, holding up his hands in surrender. “I ain’t helping with no source.” He straightens his lapels forcefully, and adds, “I already ate.”

Rimmer rolls his eyes, and, in an instinctive search for solidarity, glances towards Lister—and then regrets it, because Lister is not looking at his face.

“Count me in,” Lister says cheerily, his gaze snapping up from Rimmer’s—legs? Crotch? Trouser seams? God, Rimmer can’t even tell what Lister was looking at, but it makes the back of his neck go uncomfortably hot. “I’ve got a window in my schedule. Why not?”

Rimmer lets Lister lead the way down to the engine room, although he knows exactly where it is, and the whole way down the narrow metal steps Lister runs his mouth about all sorts of nonsense which, Rimmer supposes, is designed to impress him.

“Down here we used to have a pool table as well, and we rigged up this sound system because the acoustics were immense, so we could have a really good night—not at the minute, obviously, but maybe when it’s not knee-deep in coolant.” He looks back over his shoulder, pausing with one hand on the bannister, and Rimmer has to stop quickly to avoid crashing into the back of him. “Will you be hanging around long, d’you reckon?”

“Not terribly long, I’m afraid,” he says. “Long enough to fix you up and get you on your merry way, and then I’ll probably have to, er, dasherooni, to tell you the truth.”

“Aw, no,” Lister says, and he stops again, turning around with a pet lip Rimmer could trip over, and he braces a hand on each bannister to block Rimmer from going any further. “Really? I mean, surely you can stick around—say, for a nightcap. I’ve got a cocktail of Irn Bru and Everclear that’ll make your eyes bleed.”

“Hm,” Rimmer says, as though he’s considering it. “Thanks, but no thanks. I like to keep my eyesight when I drink, if that’s alright with you.”

“Oh yeah? What’s your poison, then?” Lister asks. “First one’s on me.”

“Dry white wine, normally,” Rimmer says absentmindedly. “But—I don’t really think I’ll be staying long.”

“What, not even long enough for me to like, send a bottle over and then give you a smouldering look along the bar?” Lister drapes himself artlessly back across one of the bannisters—which at least gives Rimmer room to step past him and hurry down to the bottom of the stairs. “No? Nothing?”

At that moment, Rimmer is mercifully saved from needing to answer by the appearance of Kryten wearing one of those little umbrella hats and a pair of waders.

“What are you doing down—” Kryten’s eyes widen, registering that Rimmer is not who he expected to see, and he draws himself up taller. “Oh—why—hello, sir!” He peers past Rimmer at Lister with frantic indignation. “Mr. Lister, sir, why didn’t you _tell_ me that we have a visitor, when the place is such a wreck and I haven’t set out the nice linens!”

“Oh, give it a rest, Kryten, we don’t need any of that smeg,” Lister says. “Just the bog-standard KFC napkins’ll do.”

“Nice to meet you, Kryten,” Rimmer says, with a warm smile which he has practiced—one which he trained to say, _you have nothing to fear from me, you’re in good hands,_ and which Molly has coached to be _‘less blood-curdling’_. He offers Kryten a hand to shake. “I’m Commander Arnold Rimmer. Friends call me Ace. I’m sort of a space hero—help out when I can, and all that.”

“I see! Do you do this regularly, then—rescuing damaged ships?” Kryten asks.

Lister bites back his smile and folds his arms across his chest, the picture of innocence. “Yeah,” he says, fighting to keep a straight face, “d’you come here often?”

Rimmer looks at him in exasperation. “What, deep space?”

Lister’s smile breaks out, wide and winsome and unbearably cheeky. “Yeah.”

Rimmer heaves a sigh and looks to Kryten as though for help, but he finds none there, as Kryten only seems utterly nonplussed by the exchange—which is about par for the course.

It doesn’t matter. It’s fine. He can survive this. Lister, at his most persistently, belligerently endearing, can throw himself at Rimmer for hours on end, and Rimmer can resist it, because Rimmer is strong. He can handle this.

Part of the problem is that Rimmer at no point actually tells him to stop—because he doesn’t want him to. Nothing is going to happen, of course it’s not, even when Lister’s fingers graze over Rimmer’s knuckles when he hands him an Allen key, even when Rimmer makes a sarky comment about the Cat being as much use as a handbrake on a kayak and Lister genuinely laughs, even when he helps him carry a large slippery case of food supplies to the other end of the deck and winks at him brazenly over the box.

_Nothing_ is going to happen.

“So, something’s gonna happen here, right?” Lister says smoothly, later, as they’re hauling a hydrogen tank back into place. With a heave and a grunt, they lock it into place, and Lister straightens up to gesture meaningfully in the air between them, back and forth. “I mean, I’m just saying what I see here, but—” He raises his eyebrows meaningfully.

“Let’s just focus on fixing your ship for now, shall we?” Rimmer says evasively, pouring all of his energy and concentration into fiddling about with a tank valve.

Lister plants both hands on the tank, opposite from Rimmer, and leans across into his space. “That doesn’t sound like a no, technically.”

“It sounds like a not right now,” Rimmer tells him.

“Oh, ey?” Lister gives another little laugh, the sound low and filthy. Rimmer is _not_ looking at him, but he can feel the megawatt intensity of that grin without even turning his head, and it is enough to make his skin prickle. “You want time to slip into something a bit more comfortable, or…?”

“What? No,” Rimmer says, and feels like he is floundering in shallow water. “No, I’m—I’m fine, I’m comfortable, I’m—”

He rubs nervously at the back of his head, and that’s when he realises that he has cocked up—he isn’t wearing the wig.

He lifts his head, eyes wide, and looks over at Lister.

Lister’s grin widens, and his gaze flicks over Rimmer, brazenly appreciative, and Rimmer feels his ears burn hot again. “I mean, you look comfortable,” Lister says, voice smooth and sarcastic, but the tilt of his smile has no malice in it, just mercilessly, relentlessly, stubbornly flirtatious. “You look like the Argos catalogue entry for _cool and relaxed_. Do they bottle whatever pure relaxation you’re exuding right now?”

It’s weird, realising that this unfiltered Lister is so aggressively chatting up _Rimmer_ —not Ace, not the idea of the superhero from a hair conditioner advert, but actually Rimmer, awkward, hopeless, wild hair and all. He doesn’t know what to say to this.

He settles for old faithful—“Oh, piss off, will you?”

Lister isn’t offended by this. He just laughs again, and pushes himself upright. “Alright, alright, message received,” he says, wiping his hands on the arse of his boilersuit. “I should go check on Kryten anyway.” He pushes his hands into his pockets, gives Rimmer a wink, and says, “Don’t work up a sweat without me,” before he walks away.

Once the sound of his footsteps has well and truly faded away, Rimmer sinks to half-sit on the tank.

He runs a hand over his hair—curly, unmanageable, gracelessly flattened into odd angles by wig and helmet both—and then over the back of his neck. Even as he feels the embarrassed heat there from this Lister’s attentions, all he can think is what his own Lister would think of this. Rimmer can almost hear it: the disbelieving guffaw, the constant ribbing and teasing, the way that Lister likes to hold himself above getting jealous but gets jealous anyway, the gradual slide into scorn and acerbity that manages to pull itself up just shy of getting properly nasty. The way Rimmer would reassure him. Except that’s not happening because—because—

Stupid.

There is more oil to be mopped up, engine function tests to be run, adjustments to be made, and while Kryten runs around making much-needed cups of tea for everyone Rimmer tries his hardest to avoid close quarters with this universe’s Lister, with limited luck.

The Cat ropes him into helping to screw a panel back into place—“It’s a two-man job, and I never thought I’d say I’m not man enough!” he cries—and then promptly vanishes as soon as Rimmer steps in to help hold the panel still, leaving Rimmer wrangling the panel alone. Frustratingly, it really is a two-man job, a fact which Rimmer is desperately trying to conceal, hoping that perhaps he can just manage a bodge-job on his own before…

“You alright there, man?”

Bollocks.

Lister elbows into the space beside him, and he reaches up to steady the panel, leaving Rimmer free to actually screw the pins back in. This also coincidentally leaves him fitted between Rimmer’s arms, his back to Rimmer’s chest with barely inches between them.

“Thanks,” Rimmer says, and does not speak again until the job is done and he can step briskly away backwards and clear the air between them.

Lister turns around to give him a measured look, wiping oil off his hands with a scrap of grotty grey rag from his pocket, and the three feet of space between them that Rimmer left clear doesn’t make a blind bit of difference. “So,” Lister says, tilting his head over to one side as though weighing Rimmer up. “Here’s the thing: I’d really like to buy you breakfast tomorrow morning.” He leans against one of the crates at his back. “Should I call you, or roll over and give you a nudge?"

Rimmer groans. “Does that line ever work for you?”

Lister grins. “I dunno. You tell me.”

“No,” Rimmer tells him. “It’s not working.”

Lister pouts. “Aw, why not?”

“I’m—I don’t—” Rimmer can feel himself getting flustered. “I don’t have time for casual sex.”

“Oh. Well.” Lister jerks his thumb back over his shoulder. “Give me five minutes, I can get into a tux.”

Against all odds, that startles a laugh out of Rimmer. He smothers it with a frown, and says, “Shut up.”

“Ooh, d’you always sweet-talk ‘em like this?” Lister teases. “It’s working for me, I’ll tell you that.”

“No, I’m—I’m not—” Smeg. Rimmer’s neck and jaw is burning hot. He doesn’t know where to look. “Look—”

“Hey!” The Cat bursts onto the scene in a dazzle of sequins and a cloud of cologne. “There you are!”

Lister looks across. “You just left us here a minute ago. What d’you want? We’re sort of in the middle of something here.”

“We’re not in the middle of anything, actually,” Rimmer say. “Just finished up, actually. All done!”

“Do you guys want a coffee?” the Cat asks.

“Oh.” Lister seems as pleasantly surprised as Rimmer is; the two of them exchange a baffled look. He says, “Thanks, man. Yeah, yes please—”

“Good—go make us all one!” the Cat interrupts. “Milk and one sugar for me.”

Lister rolls his eyes. “Cat, that’s not what I meant—you can’t just—”

The Cat cuts across him again. “And hurry it up, will you? I’m parched!”

“Hang on—”

Before Lister can lodge a proper complaint, however, their peace and quiet is otherwise disrupted by Kryten coming down from the cockpit.

“Evening, sirs,” Kryten says. “I regret to inform you that resetting the radar means going offline and rebooting all our navigation systems. The reboot should only take a few minutes, but our navicom will take three hours to come back online. If this is a problem, we could delay until later; however, given that we’ve seen three asteroid storms in the past week while traversing this sector—”

“Flying blind is not a good idea,” Lister finishes. “Right. Reboot it now. Cat—can you take the helm? Your nose might be the only warning we get before we take a meteor to the face.”

When he turns back around, it is to face Kryten, who is visibly trembling. His hands creak at his sides where he clenches his fists so hard that it sounds like he might be denting his own metal panels.

“You okay, man?” Lister asks sympathetically. “You look like you accidentally got a penny stuck in your recharge socket again.”

“No, I’m fine, sir,” Kryten says, voice wavering. “I was just thinking—well—if the Cat is at the helm, and there is still so much mopping to be done… I was wondering if I might—oh, please, sir,” he bursts out, stepping closer and reaching out as though to grasp Lister by the shoulders and shake him. “Please let me finish the mopping. Please allow me, sir.”

Lister rolls his head over to one side, meets Rimmer’s eyes with a small grimace. “Oh, go on, then,” he says after a moment, all stupid, idiotic theatrics. “You’ve twisted me arm. Go on.”

“Oh— _thank you,_ sir, thank you—you won’t regret this!” Kryten exclaims, and he clanks excitedly away to retrieve the mop.

Shaking his head, Lister looks over at Rimmer, and Rimmer suddenly remembers that he is trying not to be alone with him. “Erm—” he says, fumbling for an excuse.

“Hey,” the Cat yells from the cockpit. “Captain Spangles!”

Rimmer lifts his head. “I—” His face scrunches up in distaste, lip curling. Is that supposed to be him? “Yes?”

“That coffee ain’t gonna make itself!”

He balks at that. “I’m not—” he starts, and then he remembers himself. “I mean—yes. Of course. You have a difficult job, erm, in the—cocking the pit—helming the—cock.” Rimmer flinches. “Not to say—I didn’t mean—yes.”

A speedy exit is the ticket, Rimmer thinks, and so without another word, he turns sharply on his heel to head for the kitchen. Typically, this doesn’t go quite to plan, and his foot slides out wildly beneath him as he slips on fuel, and he staggers to right himself before he makes a tit of himself.

Rimmer makes haste into the kitchen and starts collecting together mugs, teaspoons—although a lot of things seem to be kept in different places to what he’s expecting, which is frustrating and seems to him to be unnecessary. He is just hopefully opening and closing cupboard doors in the search for some sugar when he hears, “So,” from behind him and he jumps out of his skin.

“Christ,” Rimmer yelps, and he knocks over a mug. He scrambles to grab it before it falls off the counter, frantically slapping at everything in the nearby vicinity just to be sure, and then turns to Lister. “You—oh, hello.” He gulps. “I didn’t, erm. Do you know where the sugar is?”

Lister ignores this completely. “So,” he says again, and then, “Sounds like it’s gonna take another few hours at least to get your everything patched up and ready to go.” He tilts his head over to one side like he’s taking the measure of Rimmer. I reckon we’ve got some time to kill, you and me.”

“Erm,” Rimmer says intelligently. “I—yes, I suppose so. Do you—” His voice wobbles. “Do you fancy—playing cards? I don’t have a deck with me, but if you have one, I know a few good ways to pass the time.”

“Oh, I’ve got plenty of ideas meself.” Lister plants a hand on the counter along from Rimmer, leaning his weight on it. He isn’t quite bracketing Rimmer into the corner, but he’s not far off it, and the intent is impossible to ignore.

Rimmer gulps. “Marvellous!” he says, squeakier than he would have liked. His eyes drop accidentally to Lister’s mouth, and what a smegging mistake _that_ is. “So if—if you get the cards, then—then—then—we can—we could—”

Lister cocks an eyebrow but doesn’t help him out, seemingly happy to leave him floundering. Rimmer has completely lost all control over the faculty of speech, and Lister is just watching him with this smile spreading across his face.

“We—if you’ve got—there’s always—unless you don’t want—of course, gambling is—it’s not necessarily—but if—Blackjack?” The words coming out of his mouth make no sense at all, and Rimmer would quite like to kill himself, but he can’t even do that because he’s forgotten how to move his legs. “Yahtzee? Go Fish? Poker?”

“Poker?” Lister asks, and the tilt of his smirk is wicked. “I hardly know her.”

Rimmer rolls his eyes, lifting his head heavenwards as though looking for help because Christ almighty only knows he is badly in need of some divine intervention here. “So are they paying by you the cliché, or…?”

Lister laughs and he holds his hands up in surrender. “Hey, don’t blame me,” he protests. “What am I meant to do here? The one I’m after is playing hard to get, so I’m pulling out all the tricks, including the pony ones.” His face falls then, abruptly serious. “By the way, though—did it hurt?”

Rimmer frowns.

“When you fell—”

“Oh, for smeg’s sake,” Rimmer groans, and he shoves at Lister to shut him up, but it doesn’t create any distance between them; on the contrary, Lister rocks on the balls of his feet and then seems to bounce back into Rimmer’s space. He is near enough, now, that he has to tip his chin up to look into Rimmer’s face, and at some point his hand has found the countertop by Rimmer’s hip once more. His thumb is just shy of skimming Rimmer’s belt by millimetres and the space between them feels charged and static-hot.

Rimmer tries hard not to look at Lister’s hand, so close to his body that he thinks he can feel the solid warmth of it. Then again, looking into Lister’s face is not exactly working out well for him, either—it’s like making eye contact with a solar flare, if the solar flare also wanted to ride him through the floor.

Hypothetically. Rimmer’s only guessing, here.

He swallows.

Lister leans in closer. The tip of his thumb grazes the outside seam of Rimmer’s trousers, and Rimmer feels as though his skin is three sizes too small. His throat is tight, and he thinks his ears might be fizzing.

That smirk ticks up at the corner of Lister’s mouth, and he leans in closer still. His voice, when he speaks, is low. “Do I make you nervous, big guy?”

Rimmer’s skin is burning hot all over. Liquid fire fire curls around the base of his spine and his collar is too tight and his mouth is very dry. He gulps again, and when he says, uselessly, “Erm,” his voice is an idiotic rasp. He wets his lips on impulse, and watches Lister’s gaze flicker to follow the movement. “A bit.”

“I’ll go easy on you.” Lister winks. “I’ll even keep me socks on if it makes you feel better.”

Weirdly, that does sort of make Rimmer feel better—but it doesn’t change the facts, the stupid, indisputable truth that this is all wrong, like a wine gum in a fruit salad. When Lister stretches up on tiptoes and moves in to kiss him, Rimmer doesn’t think, just reacts on instinct, and he jerks backwards hard enough that he clonks his head on the kitchen cupboards behind him.

“Ow,” Rimmer says, and shuts his eyes. This is a winning decision because it means that he doesn’t have to look at Lister’s face when he tries to find a way to say, _no thank you, I’m quite alright, I’ve been alone in space for months and months but actually I’m perfectly content with the state of my desiccated libido_.

It doesn’t safeguard him from Lister’s voice, though, and when it comes, it is gently perplexed and more accommodating than Rimmer could have hoped for. “You alright, man?”

“Sorry,” Rimmer says, and opens one eye with a wince, partly expecting that he might be hit. “I just—sorry. I can’t.”

Lister frowns. “Is there anything I can do to help?” he asks, and he pauses for a moment as though genuinely considering before he adds, in earnest, “I mean, I’ve got a Spider-Man costume I don’t mind slipping into.”

“No, it’s just…” Rimmer’s brain still feels addled, disconnected from mouth and body, and he doesn’t know what he’s going to say until he says it. He says, “I’ve got a boyfriend.” He hesitates. “Sort of.”

Lister cants his head over, considering. The tilt of his smile is secretive and a little bit dangerous. “Hey, I won’t tell him if you don’t.”

This is putting Rimmer’s self-restraint to the test. He shuts his eyes again. “No,” he manages, something strangled in the back of his throat. “No—I—it wouldn’t be fair.”

Lister’s hand finds Rimmer’s side, at last closing the space between them; his palm fits easily against his waist and the thin cold thread of a shiver unravels along Rimmer’s spine. “Look,” Lister says, and Rimmer doesn’t—can’t—when he goes on, “I won’t get my feelings hurt if you wanna pretend I’m him, honest.”

Lister makes it sound so easy. It’s more tempting than Rimmer can say.

It would be so easy to change his mind. Rimmer is fairly certain that he could say, _oh, actually, go on, then,_ and this Lister would have his trousers round his ankles before Rimmer had even finished speaking—and this Lister is so like Rimmer’s own in so many ways.

Rimmer gathers himself and forces it out: “Not fair on you—fair on _me._ ” He swallows, and he has no idea why, but he doesn’t stop there. He looks into Lister’s face and admits, “You actually… remind me of him, a lot.”

The grin that breaks out across Lister’s face then is wide and sunny, filled with open delight, gone apple-cheeked with it. “Oh, ey? You got a type?”

This seems like a perverse understatement.

Rimmer only sighs. “Tragically, I’m afraid so.”

With that, Lister backs up to give Rimmer some space, and leans instead on the edge of the table with a rueful twist of his mouth. “Smeg, man. So I’ve really not got a shot in hell, then?”

Still scarcely able to believe it himself, Rimmer shakes his head.

Lister drops his head backwards with a low groan. “Ugh,” he says. “Well, can’t blame a guy for trying.”

“Thank you,” Rimmer says, which might be the wrong thing to say. He is acutely aware of the distance put between them, and while he has spent the last twenty-two hours terrified of Lister’s advances, now he regrets the loss of them. “I mean—sorry, as well. But thanks.”

“Yeah.” Lister lifts his head with a rueful grimace. “Still gutting, though.”

Rimmer wishes there was more he could say. This isn’t exactly a scenario he’s had a lot of experience playing out—usually _he’s_ the one striking out with someone who doesn’t want to sleep with him. Christ, he’s a shell of his former self. “Sorry,” he says again, for both of them.

“Not your fault.” Lister pushes himself off the counter at his back. “Gonna go drown my sorrows in some lager and Blackjack—you still up for Plan B?”

“That sounds good,” Rimmer says, and it’s not relief he feels but disappointment. He can’t articulate why, only knows that he is desperately, humiliatingly homesick, and that this may well be as good as it ever gets, and Rimmer is trying his hardest to be good but that’s never really been his forte. Just as Lister turns to go, Rimmer bursts out, “Wait.”

He half-reaches for Lister’s arm, his hand drifting in the space between them. Lister turns back towards him, eyebrows raised, expectant and bemused, to see Rimmer caught in helpless indecision behind him.

Rimmer doesn’t know what he’s doing. He doesn’t even know what he wants. His fingers brush Lister’s sleeve but he doesn’t dare to touch him with any intent. He hesitates. “Would you hate me if—” His voice wavers. “If I wanted you to—”

He can’t even bring himself to say it, but his eyes drop meaningfully to Lister’s mouth and he hopes he understands. It’s pathetic, so embarrassing it makes his ears burn, but Lister gets it. He steps in close and he cups Rimmer’s jaw in one hand and he kisses him.

This kiss is different, no urgency or heat to it, just the soft, careful press of Lister’s mouth to his own, and Rimmer’s eyes close. It feels as though something in Rimmer is unravelling, unpicking the stitches holding him together, and there is a tightness in his chest which threatens to suffocate him. He thinks that if he could just hold Lister, press his face into his throat and breathe him in, then he would be alright. He could go on to save a thousand more universes, overthrow a different dictator every day of the week, hurtle blindly towards peril after peril—he can do it all if he can just have this first.

His hands ball into fists at his sides, pinching the seams of his flight suit between forefinger and thumb, and tries to keep himself from grabbing hold of what he can’t have. This isn’t Lister. This isn’t him. Rimmer knows that if he gives in to this, then it’s over, but it doesn’t stop him aching and aching.

Lister is so gentle with him, the pad of his thumb smoothing over Rimmer’s cheek, that Rimmer’s throat closes off, and when at last Lister pulls away, Rimmer doesn’t move. He remains there with his eyes closed and his breath caught in his throat like a soap bubble on a fingertip, because he wants to go on pretending.

Slowly, Rimmer releases his breath. The sound is embarrassingly wistful, but if this Lister thinks anything less of him for it, he doesn’t show it. Lister keeps his hand on Rimmer’s face and when Rimmer finally opens his eyes, it is to find Lister looking at him with pity, which is almost worse.

“Well, whoever he is,” Lister says, “I’m sure he’s lucky to have you.”

Rimmer pulls a face. “Can I get that in writing?”

Lister laughs, and he pats Rimmer’s cheek soundly. “Dream on, pal.”

***


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As ever, I know next to nothing about spaceship engineering. If anyone out here is an expert on the theoretical physics behind making a Bussard ramjet work, I’d love to have your phone number for future reference.

**CHAPTER THREE**

_Dear Diary,_

_729 Days – now, I am no stranger to regrets. In fact, I have a list of them that I like to run through sometimes when I can’t sleep, like a nauseating self-destructive mantra:_ remember when you decided the time to practice bravado and self-confidence was in interrupting your Scouts’ squad leader and he tore you down to size for being an arrogant, entitled shit? Remember when you came home excited to let mother and father know your good news, and you came into the hallway to overhear Frank complaining about how he was supposed to get Prefect, only they had to give the position to some drippy useless nobody out of pity, and you stood in the hallway with your new badge seeming more tarnished by the second? Remember when you were so desperate to have kissed someone that you agreed to get off with Tamara Dawson in the changing rooms even though she had an infected spot and a head brace and she called you names the whole time?

_By this point, I’m something of an expert when it comes to lamenting every decision I’ve ever made, but this one is different. This one could genuinely kill me, and not in the poxy, half-arsed sort of way that a Cadmium leak killed me—because God,_ God _, I should really have shagged that Lister._

_What even came over me? Was I spontaneously possessed by the ghost of a demure, frill-throated, virginal Regency-era maiden—_ oh no, sir, I must save myself for my One Love, he who chews and eats his own toenails. You’d like to deflower me? Oh, no, sir, I’m afraid I must renege on that offer, for I have an appointment to mournfully flutter an embroidered handkerchief out of a train window _. Talk about smegging pathetic._

_I mean, let’s face it—when exactly am I likely to come across another Lister who would genuinely like to have sex with me? I’ll pencil it in for the Twelfth of Never, shall I? And maybe will I’m at it I’ll also schedule myself an appointment to dry-wax my armpits, just for a laugh. You useless smegging twat._

***

“I just don’t think it’s fair,” Rimmer starts angrily. “He made the moves on _me_ —I wasn’t the pursuer, alright, I was the pursued, and he pursued me like—like—like I was just some _thing_ to… to be pursued! You know? He kissed me first, he propositioned me first, he did everything first—because it was all his idea and I was dragged along into it. I never put up my hand and said, _Excuse me? If you don’t mind terribly, I’m going to fall in love with you now, and then—_ wham! Rose petals scattered on the duvet and you’re trying to remember how to uncork the champagne without taking someone’s eye out. I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t sign up for some stupid romantic epic across time and space, and I don’t want it! Epics are rubbish! They go on too long and everyone ends up still a little bit depressed even if they get a happily ever after—and I’m already a little bit depressed! I can’t accumulate any more existential despondency or I’ll get seized for a holiday in Costa del Rubber Rooms. And what’s more, I didn’t sign up to be Ace! Lister bullied me into that, too! Lister made me go and talk to him, and then tricked me into saying yes to training to be him, and then backed me into a corner so I couldn’t say _no thanks, must dash, think I left the oven on—_ he made me attend my own funeral, for smeg’s sake! He made me sit there and listen as he said nice things about me to my face, only I wasn’t me, I was Ace, but I was being me being Ace grieving me! What choice did I have, I ask you?!”

Lister blinks. His head is propped on his fist, one gerbil cheek smushed like overwarm Playdoh. Now he lifts his head, seeming somewhat disoriented. “What?”

“Well?” Rimmer prompts, with perhaps more aggression than the conversation requires.

“Well what?”

“Well, what do you think?”

“I think I haven’t been properly listening for the past twenty minutes,” Lister admits. “The last thing I remember was… you and Jonesy Spalding in the special prefect bathroom—when he made you layer two jumpers over your PE kit so it’d feel like you had tits. How much have I missed since then?”

“That was fifth-form!” Rimmer says indignantly. “I’ve been talking for fifteen years since then!”

“Smegging hell, it feels like it.”

“You’re not helping at all,” Rimmer accuses, scowling. “You’re as much help as a mirror at the National Institute for the Blind and Ugly.”

“What do you want me to say?!” Lister bursts out, sitting up. “Sorry you got dumped. Sorry for being so magnetically attractive in every dimension that you can’t leave me well enough alone. Sorry your brothers filled your toothpaste with paint stripper. Sorry I called you a pathetic, grovelling, worm-hearted little thorn of self-hatred with the personality of a toilet brush.”

Rimmer frowns. “Wait, when was this?”

Lister waves him away. “Not important right now.”

That answer does not reassure Rimmer in the slightest. “And anyway, I didn’t _get dumped,_ thank you very much indeedy,” he says acidly. “I just got tricked into making a truly, monumentally, colossally stupid idea of becoming a superhero, and we never really negotiated what would happen to our relationship in the meantime.”

“Just run that by me one more time, will you?” Lister says. “He encouraged you to leave on a one-way trip, told all your mates you were dead, and…”

“Now wait a minute,” Rimmer says. “You’re twisting this—it wasn’t like that.”

“He dumped you, man.”

“He did not!” Rimmer insists. “He just—he—he only told everyone that I was dead so that—so that—well, it gave me no choice but to become Ace, because—because—the universe needed a superhero, and I was the one up for the job, and—and—and—” The words sputter and give out, like a dying engine, as he turns over everything that has happened to lead him to this point, and his shoulder sag. “Oh my God. He smegging dumped me.”

Lister grimaces. He claps a hand to Rimmer’s shoulder in what is either a very lacklustre attempt of reassurance, or a gesture of smug condescension. “Told you so.” The latter, then.

Just when Rimmer thought his exile to the far reaches of deep space couldn’t get more depressing... He sits there with his hands limp and loose against the table, and he overthinks every millisecond of his time with Lister. The times when Lister lay quiet and still beside him in bed—was he really sleeping, or was he just pretending because he was filled with deep contempt for the man beside him? True, he was snoring, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. The times when Lister got up to get a lager from the fridge and didn’t offer Rimmer anything—even though Rimmer is dead and doesn’t need to drink, and even though for several years he was physically incapable of it—was that a secret message designed to communicate his hidden loathing? Oh _God_.

Christ, why didn’t Lister _say something_? If Rimmer had known that he was pledging all his love and a great deal of his sanity at the altar of a useless git who didn’t even like him, he would have made some very different decisions. Not let him see his penis, for one thing.

Some small, secret, very stupid part of Rimmer is still not convinced—it’s not that he doesn’t trust Lister, per se, but if Rimmer was on fire and Lister had the extinguisher, he’d still call emergency services—and so, with nowhere else to turn, he goes begrudgingly to Molly.

“Er, Molly?” he says, as he straps himself into the cockpit.

She winks into view on the screen, looking as pleased to him as ever. “Oh, God. What now?”

Rimmer ignores the implications there and says, “I want your opinion on something.”

“Yeah, I do think plastic surgery could be your best interest,” Molly says mildly.

“No—wait, what do you—forget it.” Rimmer huffs, shakes himself. He feels he can’t concentrate with the wig prickling at the nape of his neck; he pulls it off, tosses it aimlessly to the cockpit floor somewhere near the emergency ejector lever. “No, look, I wanted to ask if—I was wondering—whether you think Lister and I… are finished.”

Molly doesn’t hesitate. She doesn’t even give the breath of a pause, for the illusion that maybe she had to take a second to think about it. “You’re in separate dimensions, mate,” she says. “I mean, I reckon even the term 'long-distance' is pushing it, at this point.”

Rimmer steadies himself, determined not to let her get to him. Certainly, it’s not the answer he would have liked, but… more importantly— “Do you think Lister knew that when he suggested it?” he asks quietly.

“Knew what?” Molly asks. “That this is a one-way trip, you mean?”

Rimmer says nothing.

Now, for the first time, Molly does hesitate. “ _You_ knew that, didn’t you?” she says, in an overly cautious tone that sets a tornado siren clanging between Rimmer’s ears. “You must have known that. Please tell me you read the small print and you knew.”

“Oh,” Rimmer says. “No—yes, I know. I knew that.”

In hindsight, it is so obvious that Rimmer understands why no-one had thought to mention this. One Ace is recruited by the death of the previous one—ergo, the only way out is as a burnt lightbee in a very small coffin. It shouldn’t have required an in-depth explanation, and so Rimmer is faced with the debilitating emotional double-jab of experiencing simultaneously the humiliation of his own brainlessness alongside the realisation that he is almost certainly stranded out here.

There is a tightening in his chest, something hot and awful and suffocating, and he tightens his jaw to the point of giving himself the beginnings of a fierce headache because otherwise there is a dramatic risk that he might be about to do something very un-Ace-like. He is determined not to cry in front of Molly. In fact, he is determined not to cry at all.

Rimmer rubs a hand down over his face, pinches the bridge of his nose between forefinger and thumb. Maybe if he presses hard enough on his tear ducts then he can sort of temporarily disable them. It’s certainly worth a try.

Slowly, with a Herculean effort, Rimmer takes a deep breath and tries to resume the conversation as though he has not just had the very fabric of his universe yanked out from underneath him like a glass-laden parlour trick tablecloth. In a voice that is carefully steady, he says, “But… did Lister know that, do you think?”

“I really couldn’t say, Arnold,” Molly says. There is silence between them, and then, after a long moment, she says, “Sorry,” which seems to take them both by surprise.

“Not your fault,” he mutters, feeling uncharacteristically gracious—in part because he is only too painfully aware of whose fault it must really be, if Lister jettisoned him off through space and time as the lazy man’s alternative to ‘ _it’s not you, it’s me’._ Logic stands: _it’s not me, it’s you. You’re the problem. You are._

Then again, he always is. Nothing new there.

He gets himself just about under control with another deep breath, wipes roughly at his face, and then starts jabbing at _Wildfire’s_ control panel with perhaps only slightly more aggression than is required.

“Right,” he says, brisk and officious. “Where to, next?”

***

Sometimes Rimmer feels less like a space-bending superhero and more like a transdimensional health and safety inspector.

“And you say you have no recollection of anything that might have caused the time lesion to manifest in the microwave,” Rimmer checks, making notes as he does—so sue him, it makes the details easier to remember—on his natty little clipboard—so sue him, it’s _convenient_.

“Absolutely not,” Petrauskas says fervently, in a voice that wouldn’t be amiss in the Welsh National Youth Choir. “I came in, shoved in a moussaka ready-meal, and then, _bam._ I was ten years old. If it’s shaving off sixteen years at a go, I can’t afford getting stuck in it again—I’ll be beyond the point of even being a twinkle in the milkman’s eye.”

“Hm,” Rimmer says by way of reply, only half-listening. “Now, I see in your ship’s manifest you have no record of any temporal manipulation devices onboard, but is there any chance you might have missed something? Brought something on by accident, perhaps, or—”

“Oh, yeah, we have got something, but not by accident,” Petrauskas says. “Maybe—what, three weeks ago, now? We picked up this time-drive which was dated from 2631. We were gonna take it back for analysis.”

Irritated, Rimmer’s eyes flick up to fix on Petrauskas. “But you didn’t log it on the ship’s manifest,” he says testily.

“Well, no. I mean, I was gonna at some point… I just kept forgetting, you know? Always other things to do.”

“Yes, why bother alerting the ship’s AI that you’re carrying something which could bend the fabric of time and reality when you could be organising your Hot Wheels collection,” Rimmer mutters.

“Hey, look, I don’t see why it even matters anyway, so—”

“It matters,” Rimmer cuts across, “because if you logged it on the manifest, JMC computer AI is programmed to flag up a risk to life in case, oh I don’t know, a massive time lesion tears into your smegging microwave while you’re heating up porridge.” Rimmer clicks his pen imperiously before he scribbles down the damning conclusion. “So, we know what caused it, then…”

“Oh. My bad.”

“Indeed. Your bad.” Rimmer holsters his pen. “Your ship is a write-off. All you can do is turn around, take it back to the shop—where did you set off from, Pluto? Christ—a long trek back then, without the use of the microwave, and hope for the best.”

“Wait, what? You can’t fix me?!” Petrauskas demands. “No, that’s not fair, you said you would help.”

“I have helped,” Rimmer snaps. “It’s not my fault you’re a moron who doesn’t follow regulations which have been put in place for a damn good reason.”

Petrauskas huffs his breath. “This is pathetic. Absolutely shoddy turn-out, really poor customer service, I have to say.”

Rimmer’s temper flares. “Oh, you have to? You have to, do you? Right, where’s this bloody time-drive, then?” He snaps his fingers impatiently. “Come on, let’s have it here.”

Petrauskas strides away and retrieves a box from under the kitchen sink. A shoebox, to be specific. A shoebox which has clearly been dripped on and is warping in the damp.

“Oh, wonderful, you’ve been keeping it in a shoebox, like the phenomena of time bleeding everywhere is a dead gerbil getting buried in the back garden. Fantastic. Give it here—” Rimmer snatches the box out of Petrauskas’ hands, hefts it for a moment to feel the weight, and then heaves the whole bloody thing into the microwave.

“Wait, what are you doing?!” Petrauskas exclaims, but before he can say or do anything further, Rimmer has punched in a thirty second defrost.

There is a hot white flash, and then there is nothing. The microwave is empty. There is no time-drive. There is no time lesion.

Rimmer dusts his hands. “There you are!” he says briskly. “All done. No more lesion. That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?”

Petrauskas gapes. “I mean—yeah, but…” He hears his own voice—squeaking and high-pitched—and looks down at his hands, aghast. “Hey! I’m still a fucking child!”

“Language,” Rimmer chastises. “Any more of that and I’ll be docking your pocket money.”

“You cheap git, you said you would fix this!”

Rimmer looks pointedly at the now perfectly functional microwave. “I have fixed it.”

“And fix _me_!”

Rimmer shrugs. “You didn’t want to wait to get back to Pluto,” he says simply. “This is the alternative. But look on the bright side—I’m sure you’ll do really well on your Year 6 SATs.”

Petrauskas sputters indignantly, looking as though he might be about to cry, and Rimmer takes that as his cue to leave on a high note.

***

Lister’s tongue finds the hollow under the hinge of Rimmer’s jaw, kisses him slow and hot, and Rimmer can’t get his hands on bare skin fast enough. Teeth at Rimmer’s pulse and his knees go liquid—the wet drag of Lister’s mouth down Rimmer’s throat—his breath fans warm over Rimmer’s skin and lifts a shiver the length of his spine. Lister’s thigh between his legs is warm and solid, and every time he surges forwards to kiss Rimmer harder, to press him more fiercely back against the wall, the friction curls delicious heat in Rimmer’s gut, and he wants him so badly it aches.

He feels desperate and greedy and stupid with it, open-mouthed and breathing ragged. He cups the back of Lister’s neck to pull his head up for a clumsy, heated kiss. When Rimmer’s teeth catch Lister’s lower lip, Lister makes a low noise in the back of his throat that turns Rimmer’s skin electric.

“Lister,” he manages, his voice a threadbare scrape of sound, “Lister, please—”

Instinctively understanding, Lister pulls him closer, sighing in the squeeze of Rimmer’s incredibly strong, muscular arms. “Oh, Rimsy,” he says, breathless, and he reaches up to thread a hand through Rimmer’s hair—knocking loose Rimmer’s hat in the process, but at that moment, Rimmer can’t find it in him to care.

Lister’s hand tightens in Rimmer’s hair, lifting a helpless groan from Rimmer’s mouth, but then Lister pulls away, stooping to retrieve—

“Your hat, Rimmer,” he says, his voice deep and rough with desire. “Please… keep the hat on.” He presses in close again, affixes the bicorne securely to Rimmer’s head, and then kisses him again, passionately.

It feels so good and when Rimmer rocks his hips against him, he can feel how badly Lister wants it, too, hard in his mud-spattered breeches. The ground is slippery underfoot, but Rimmer is anchored by Lister’s hands on his hips, by the slick heat of his mouth. He wants more.

Rimmer fumbles between them, fingers clumsy and frantic, and shoves one hand down the front of Lister’s pantalons. When Rimmer finally touches him, roughly, urgently, Lister gasps. “God—yeah,” he breathes. “Like that—like that—oh— _monsieur_ —”

The rain—by the way, it’s raining—comes down heavier now, plastering Rimmer’s heavy woollen coat against his skin, plinking gently against the musket slung over Lister’s shoulder.

Lister arches, pushes into Rimmer’s hand, and the sound he makes is hungry, desperate. “Fuck, fuck—like that, monsieur,” he groans, and his accent treads that delicate, highly erotic line between Scouse and O-level French. “Oui— _oui_ —”

His hands come up to cling to Rimmer’s shoulders, then sweeping up his neck, palming at Rimmer’s jaw before he kisses him again. Their tongues slide together as Lister grinds forwards into him, and Rimmer hears himself make a low, breathless noise into Lister’s mouth—a noise which is both sensual and deeply masculine—as white heat flares through him. He wants more, wants it now, wants all of Lister that he can get, and he tells him, mutters it against his lips: “Oh, Listy—fuck—tu est… _gorgeous_ —”

“Oh, monsieur,” Lister pants again, and he dips his head until his mouth is slack against Rimmer’s jaw as he gasps for breath. His voice cracks as he gets close. “Mon cheri—oui, comme ça—Monsieur Bonaparte, oui— _oui—_ ”

Rimmer bursts awake with a gasp and sits up so fast that he smacks his head against the ceiling.

For a moment, he is wildly disoriented. Then he understands. He lies back down. He thinks, very briefly, about killing himself.

His heart is thundering and he is beaded with a fine sweat and he is almost painfully turned on. His head is still spinning with the image of Lister in Grande Armée uniform and butchering the French language. Christ alive, he needs a shag.

Rimmer smegging _hates_ this—and all he can think is how this mortifying ordeal is Lister’s fault. This whole thing is so deeply unfair. The point was that they were supposed to go on space adventures together, not for Rimmer to aimlessly wander the galaxies alone.

He’s always been hopeless at being independent—his entire school career was dictated by whose coattails he could ride on, and he’s never got a job his mother didn’t have to pull strings for—and he was an idiot to think he could go it alone.

He takes deep, steadying breaths through his nose.

God, he should have got off with that Lister in Dimension 415. Maybe if he had, he wouldn’t now feel like a badly darned sock over a bunion, stretched taut and thin to fraying. Maybe he wouldn’t be having absurd Napoleonic wet dreams. Although…

Rimmer lifts the blanket and gives a sigh of relief.

Napoleonic dry dreams, at least. Then again, somehow that’s worse, because now he still hasn’t resolved the issue at hand.

It’s one thing for Rimmer to wish that he’d slept with an alternate version of Lister, but there is still that niggling discomfort at the idea—a mixture of guilt over the imagined disloyalty, combined with this ugly, seething bitterness. The logic, however irrational it may be, is this: as long as he sticks to his principles and refuses to get involved with any parallel universe Listers, he can cling to the pretence that no other Arnold has ever made eyes at his own Lister.

As long as he keeps his hands to himself, then no past Ace will have invited Lister to bed, no new Rimmer will replace him in _Starbug_ ’s bunk, no future Arnolds will reign supreme. If he goes to bed with any Lister, however, it’s open season. All bets are off. Rimmer’s overactive imagination has already conjured a viciously graphic mental image—flight suit down to his thighs, Lister’s leathers round his ankles—and it’s hard to shake. It’s not an unsexy mental image, to be fair, but the jealousy over something that might not have ever even happened curdles hotly in Rimmer’s throat and makes him feel sick to his stomach.

Of course, the easiest way to put this paranoia to rest would simply be asking Lister, but that’s hardly likely, seeing as he is never going to see Lister again.

Rimmer lets out his breath, long and slow. It feels like pushing the air from a puncture.

He is never going to see Lister again.

Molly said it herself: this is a one-way trip. Mournfully saving himself for someone a thousand realities away doesn’t make any sense. What did he even think would happen? That if he was really good and wore some kind of smegging intergalactic chastity belt then the previous Ace Rimmer would come back from the dead and say, _Only joking! I’m back to resume the mantle, now off you pop to get your end away with your beloved Neanderthal._ God, he’s so fucking stupid.

Rimmer presses his fingertips into his eye-sockets hard enough and long enough that he starts to see beige pixels behind his eyelids, and then he lets his arms flop uselessly back to the mattress.

Well, he reflects morosely as he stares up at the ceiling, that’s one way to kill an erection. So at least there’s that.

***

_Dear Diary,_

_No idea how long it’s been. Haven’t written anything down recently. Very little to report—and this is coming from someone who’s last entry ‘of note’ was reporting a particularly painful bogey, so._

_I miss Lister._

***

“Arnold, we need to reprogram the next jump—I got some daft little notification about needing an update in the night and when I woke up, it’d wiped wherever we were set to go next,” Molly says around a yawn in the morning, while Rimmer is getting himself put together for the day—or week, or however it is that time passes in this stupid poxy spaceship. “Take a look at the charts, will you, and pop something new in?”

Rimmer pays no heed whatsoever. In fact, he is busy inspecting his teeth in the mirror.

“Arnold, are you listening to me?”

Rimmer runs his tongue over his front teeth, checks again.

“Arnold,” Molly says again, her voice increasingly irritated now. “ _Arnold_.”

“If anyone wants my attention,” Rimmer announces loftily to the empty cockpit, now reaching up to rummage for a magazine from the overhead netting, “I’m sure they know how to get it.”

There is a beat of silence. “I’m not calling you Ace.”

Rimmer sits bolt upright, outraged. “Why not?!”

“You haven’t earned it.”

“But I _am_ Ace!” Rimmer insists. “Look at me—I’ve got the wig, I’ve got the spangly jumpsuit, what else do you want from me?”

“Being Ace isn’t a fancy-dress outfit, you great pillock,” Molly says. “It’s a—a _quality._ It’s a way of acting.”

Rimmer rolls his eyes. “Oh, piss off. Whether you like it or not, whether you’d prefer I was someone else, the fact is I’m the one with the job at the minute. I got picked—deal with it. And don’t you think there’s a damn fine reason why I was chosen to become Ace?”

“Yeah, the old one got shot by a Nazi.”

“What—no. That is _not_ why.”

“Course it is. Ace 921 got shot in the lightbee while surfing a crocodile down from an exploding Nazi airplane and you were the nearest and most convenient Rimmer-shaped, Rimmer-adjacent thing we could find in the time we had.”

There is too much in that single sentence for Rimmer to unpack. He opts for unhearing it, pretending he has never been given this information, and goes forwards instead with, “But surely that means something! Surely, _surely_ , it’s not all just random coincidence.”

“Somehow, you don’t strike me as the destiny type,” Molly comments.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“I dunno. You just seem like the kind of person life sort of happens to by accident. Like you never should’ve even made it to the egg, only all the other sperm got a leg cramp in the first five-hundred.”

Rimmer sniffs disdainfully. “Well, the joke’s on you,” he says. “I found out once that the only reason my mother even opened her legs to my father a fourth time was because she was convinced she’d already hit menopause, so.”

Molly says nothing to this. She just looks at him, eyebrows slightly raised, an expression of mingled pity and contempt on her screen. “Oh, Arnold,” she says. “You do realise that’s worse, don’t you?”

Rimmer’s eyes narrow. “One of these days,” he tells her, “I’m going to uninstall you and download Sudoku instead.”

“Brave,” Molly says. “Didn’t think you’d be able to count to ten.”

In a fit of rage, Rimmer leans across and turns her off.

***

This time, when they come to land in the _Red Dwarf_ hangar, there is something different that Rimmer can’t quite put his finger on. It’s awfully quiet, for one thing, and for another, when Rimmer opens the cockpit door and climbs down, he comes face to face with a familiar face from a long time ago.

Rimmer blinks. “Todhunter?”

The man with the clipboard frowns. “I beg your pardon?”

“I just—sorry,” Rimmer fumbles. “You look a lot like—never mind.” He supposes there isn’t really a polite, lovable superhero way to say, _you look just like this twat I used to despise_. He goes instead into his usual spiel: “Ace Rimmer, here to save the day—”

“Rimmer?” Todhunter-not-Todhunter echoes in disbelief. “Christ, I did think you reminded me of someone… but— _Rimmer_?”

“Ah.” Rimmer gives a curt nod, trying to hide his sinking dismay. “You’ve got your own Rimmer, then.”

“We certainly do. In fact—” Todhunter shakes his head with a low laugh. “Come on. You can meet him shortly. Oh, the Captain will love this. Right, this way.”

The ship that Todhunter leads him through is identical to Rimmer’s own _Red Dwarf_ with only one clear exception—every is still alive. On every floor, everywhere he looks, there are uniformed JMC personnel hurrying back and forth. The general air of concern and purposeful industriousness brings to Rimmer’s attention something else which is different: the ship’s corridors are cold, almost to the point of breath curling white in front of their faces, and there is a harsh electric smell.

“What’s wrong with the ship?” Rimmer asks as he follows Todhunter up to the drive room. “The engines aren’t running—what’s going on?”

“I’ll let the captain talk you through it,” Todhunter says evasively, and then they step together into the drive room—which is somehow even colder than the rest of the ship—and amongst all the worried officers in gloves and woollen hats, Rimmer at last sees the captain of _Red Dwarf._

Rimmer says loudly, “What the f—”

“Afternoon, gentlemen,” Captain Rimmer says imperiously, his legs braced in different time-zones, his hands clasped in the small of his back. “Now, now—what do we have here?”

“This is a joke,” Rimmer says. “This must be.”

“Something funny, miladdo?” the other Rimmer barks, and then his eyes narrow. “Wait a minute.” He strides in closer, glowering, nostrils furiously aquiver. “You’re… _me_.”

“Afraid so, er—sir.” Rimmer clears his throat. “From another dimension. I’m here to help, in whatever way I can. Commander Ace Rimmer, at your service.”

“Ace?” Captain Rimmer gives a short, sharp laugh—whether it’s sincere or scornful is hard to say. “That’s a hell of a nickname. How’d you get a moniker like that one?”

Rimmer opens his mouth, and then hesitates. “I, er—it’s—” Bollocks. He has no smegging idea. “It’s a long story, Captain. Now—correct me if I’m wrong, but you seem to have got yourself into something of a scrape. It’s colder than a nun’s knickers in here. Why aren’t the engines running?”

For a moment, Captain Rimmer regards him a critical eye. Then he jerks his head over. “My office is this way. We’ll talk there.”

This only gets more surreal by the second. As Rimmer follows his alternate across the room to his office, Rimmer tries to get a read on him—he’s haughty, but not a prick, and at least in this reality he has the authority to back it up; he seems mellower, mostly, although obviously still no-nonsense and macho and as tough as old beef, just as Rimmer himself is. His uniform is starched and ironed to perfection, and his hair lies flatter than Rimmer has ever accomplished for himself, and he is wearing a wedding ring. Rimmer wants to ask but doesn’t feel that now is the time.

“So you’ve noticed that we’re dead in the water, did you? Well, you’re certainly sharp, I’ll give you that much. You and I have that in common.”

“As well as a few other things,” Rimmer adds.

Captain Rimmer flicks a withering look at him. “What do you mean by that?”

Rimmer falters. “I just meant—you know, because we’re—we’re—never mind. It’s not important. You were telling me about the ship.”

With an incline of his head, the captain gestures for Rimmer to lead the way into his office—the captain’s office—which belongs to a version of Rimmer, the captain—Captain Rimmer’s captainy office—and Rimmer feels as though he is stepping through the rabbit hole. There is a plush chair for guests to sit in, but Rimmer doesn’t. This feels weird enough as it is; he stands.

Captain Rimmer moves around the desk and sits. “We’re currently on our back-up generators at the moment—have been for the last three days. You may have noticed it’s a bit nippy. Even at reduced power on so-called luxuries, we’re still running lower and lower. If we can’t get the reactor running again, it’s going to quite significantly colder, I’m afraid.”

“What’s wrong with the reactor?”

“Not the reactor itself, per se—the ramscoop. The deflection field has been on the fritz recently, and the last asteroid storm knocked the reactor inlet funnel out of alignment,” Captain Rimmer says, in the nonchalant tones of someone who completely expects that his listener understands every word, which tragically, is not the case here. “We’ve been guzzling hydrogen without sweeping in any new ion streams, and we’ve got no way of realigning it short of getting someone on a long spacewalk into the ramscoop, which—you can imagine—is not a job anyone’s volunteering for.”

“Oh dear,” Rimmer says.

“Then again,” Captain Rimmer goes on, spreading his hands, and he sits back comfortably in his seat, “I get the sense we may have found ourselves the perfect volunteer—just in time.”

“Well—excellent news,” Rimmer says cheerfully. “Hope I’m not too much of a spare part, then!”

Captain Rimmer looks at him.

Rimmer gets the sense he has missed someth—oh. “What, me?”

“Mighty good of you to offer!” the captain declares, clapping his hands together decisively, and he nearly jumps to his feet. “Cowards, my crew, the lot of them—all too concerned about being pulverised, or suffocated… Not a speck of good old-fashioned, lion-hearted, death-or-glory courage between the lot of them.”

“Oh.” Rimmer thinks this sounds a lot like he is being manipulated, but he doesn’t think about it too hard, because it also sounds as though Captain Rimmer thinks he’s really cool and brave. “Well—I suppose I am a hardlight hologram, so—”

“Are you?” Captain Rimmer blinks. “Well—even better.”

Rimmer frowns.

Whatever misgivings he may be fostering, however, he doesn’t get a chance to voice them, as then the other Rimmer is surging out of his chair, striding purposefully round the desk, and heading for the door. “No time to waste, then. Come on. I’ll show you to our boffins working on the reactor.”

Obediently, Rimmer follows.

As they make their way out into the hallway and towards the lifts, Captain Rimmer clears his throat delicately. “Say,” he starts, “if you kick the bucket in the process—we couldn’t necessarily guarantee that we’d have the fuel to haul your corpse back out.” He pauses, considering. “Human tissue contains hydrogen, doesn’t it?”

“Not when it’s made out of light, no,” Rimmer points out.

The other Rimmer gives a sulky sort of huff, as though he had been rather looking forward to the idea of feeding him into the ramscoop, but he says nothing, only jabs the lift buttons rather fiercely.

They travel a few hundred floors in silence, Rimmer fidgeting awkwardly, the captain staring straight ahead, chin lifted, in a pose that is probably supposed to exert dominance, but mostly seems uncomfortable.

Rimmer rocks on his heels. He taps his fingers against his thigh. “So—if you don’t mind me asking,” Rimmer says, who cannot wrap his head around it, “how exactly did you get to be Captain?”

“The same way you became Commander, I imagine,” Captain Rimmer replies, and cracks his neck, jutting his chin confidently outwards. “By being the best.”

“Oh, of course,” Rimmer says, laughing politely. “But, I mean—more specifically, if we could just be a tad more specific—”

“Here we are.” The lift _dings_ into place, and the doors slide open; Captain Rimmer makes a daft little gesture that Rimmer fervently hopes _he’s_ never done, and then strides out onto the engineering deck.

Inside, everything is all go—smoke and sparks, engineers and scientists arguing, mechanics unrolling sheafs of schematics, skutters charging back and forth clutching tools—and the hive of activity almost makes up for how cold and quiet the reactor is, deep in the bowels of the engineering decks.

“Right, where is he?” Captain Rimmer mutters, slowing as he scans the deck below. “Ah. There—my Chief Engineer, Dr. Lister. He’ll run the operation for you, explain what needs doing, and I’ll leave you in his capable hands.”

Rimmer blinks. Dr. Lister—this universe just keeps getting stranger and stranger. Not only has Lister been to university, he’s been three times, and weirder still, this other Rimmer seems to think highly of him. It’s rare for him to hear any version of himself being complimentary towards Lister—and this is coming from the guy who once let Lister spit in his mouth.

“Lister!” Captain Rimmer calls across and flags him down with a wave as he leads the way briskly down the narrow metal steps to the main floor. “A word?”

There he is—another day, another Lister. He lifts his head and waves back.

“That’s three already, technically,” Lister calls across, pulling off greasy work gloves as he moves to meet them. His boiler suit is somewhat threadbare around the knees, but otherwise clean and well-presented, a crisp white T-shirt visible underneath the denim—and it actually is white. He wears his hair in loose coils, piled into some approximation of a bun on the back of his head; he has the same collection of battered rings on both hands and a smudge of what looks like engine oil across the apple of his cheek. He looks stupidly, ridiculously, unbearably handsome. As he nears them, he clocks Rimmer’s presence, and his expression turns to bewilderment. “Who the smeg is this?”

“Another me. Another dimension,” Captain Rimmer explains.

Rimmer reaches out a hand. “Nice to meet you. I’m Ace.”

Lister’s grin takes Rimmer off-guard. “Yeah, I’ll say.” He shakes Rimmer’s hand. “Dave,” he says, and even after he lets go, he watches Rimmer with open curiosity.

“Commander Ace here has volunteered the ramscoop walk,” Captain Rimmer goes on. “I’ll let you brief him properly on all the details—unless—I mean, is there anything else you need from my end?” he asks of Lister, his hand briefly finding Lister’s elbow.

“Don’t think so—we’re more or less set, capitano,” Lister tells him with a wink that Rimmer thinks must surely, _surely_ be picked up on as insubordination or at the very least, basic insolent knavery—but Captain Rimmer only rolls his eyes and thanks him. He offers Rimmer a word of good luck, and then he is gone, striding with self-importance back the way they came.

That’s it, then. Rimmer is left alone with Lister and this team of lunatics who’d like to see him on some kind of suicide mission. Perfect.

Rimmer claps his hands together. “Right,” he says, trying to sound braver than he feels. “Where do I start?”

It’s not as complicated as it at first sounded, but it turns out to be much, much more difficult. The engineering team are delighted to find he’s already dead, as he’ll be much more dextrous without a spacesuit, and as such able to get the job done much more quickly. He gets strapped into a harness, hooked up to all kinds of terrifying little sensors—regardless of him not being alive, apparently, as he tries to point this out and is informed that, truthfully, it will be mostly gauging how much radiation he is exposed to, whether it will be safe to bring him back inside, or whether they would need to jettison him—and equipped with more tools than he thinks he could ever need to use.

Thankfully, as he waddles awkwardly to the airlock and is sealed in, there is a crackle in the stupid little headset that he has been forced to wear, and Lister’s voice comes through.

_“How’re you feeling, man?”_

“Oh, absolutely peachy, perfectly wonderful, thanks,” Rimmer gabbles. His stomach squeezes as he watches the airlock’s pressure-gauge slowly tick down to the point at which his head should really explode. “Fine, fine, fine, just great, thank you, absolutely fine—why do you ask?”

_“Your heart-rate’s reading at 166 beats per minute.”_

“Oh, really?” Rimmer says, his voice shooting high. “Well, that’s interesting to know. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you for that information! I really, really needed to—”

_“Hey, hey, just breathe,”_ Lister interrupts. _“Shut up and just—breathe for a second. In and out. Deep breaths. You’re gonna be fine.”_

“I’m going to be fine,” Rimmer repeats, trying to breathe. “I’m going to be fine. I’m going to—I’m going to be sick. I’m—”

_“Didn’t I tell you to shut up?”_

Rimmer’s mouth snaps closed, his teeth clicking. He gulps, and he squeezes his eyes tightly shut, and he takes deep, slow breaths through his nose while Lister counts to thirty. Then, with Lister’s voice still in his ear, he sets off.

He picks his way carefully, laboriously, along the edge of the ship, clinging to his safety tethers and rambling a litany of expletives every time he has to unclip the carabiner to move along to the next section of the ship, all while Lister tells him how much further to go, how much longer it should take, how well he’s doing. Then he’s in the ramscoop, and there is nowhere for the safety tethers to be clipped—just the open mouth of the deflection field, hundreds of kilometres in diameter, and a series of handholds all the way down into the reactor inlet funnel. He may be floating in space, but it’s still a long way down.

“I can do this,” Rimmer mutters to himself. “I can do this.”

_“Yeah, you can,”_ Lister’s voice comes back, warm and reassuring, and it doesn’t feel so impossible then. “ _I’m right here with you, every step of the way._ ”

It takes over an hour to climb down, but as promised, Lister sticks with him the whole time. Giving him instructions, telling him he’s doing okay, reminding him to breathe when his foot slips and he dangles briefly over a terrifying chasm which surely even his light-bee in hardlight wouldn’t survive—keeping him sane. _You’re doing great, man. Alright, next up, let’s see—can you point the headset camera at the joints?_ Telling him what to do when he finally reaches the inlet funnel and is called upon to use his own body weight to heave everything back into alignment, his feet braced against the side of the ramscoop; explaining step-by-step how to reinforce the panelling, like he’s been blindfolded and told to build an IKEA bookcase; cheering him on when he gets it right; reminding him to check that the welder is the right way around before he turns it on.

The sound of Lister’s voice is deeply familiar— _you’re doing great, just keep going, nearly there_ —even if the words are very different to what he’s accustomed to. It's reassuring in a way that Rimmer could never have anticipated, and when he steps back onto solid ground afterwards to the cheers of the engineering team, the reactor slowly whirring back to life behind them, Rimmer staggers for a moment, and stumbles unthinkingly into Lister as though to fall into his arms.

At the last second, he stops himself, but Lister reaches out with a warm smile and a hand to steady him. “Hey, careful there, big man,” he teases, and Rimmer feels his ears get very hot in a truly humiliating Pavlovian response. “You okay?”

Rimmer nods mutely. His legs are wobbling beneath him and he thinks he will need to sit down very soon, or otherwise fall down, but he isn’t about to tell Lister that.

“You did great in there,” Lister tells him, completely earnest. “Honestly amazing. A hundred percent, no way we could’ve done that without you.”

“No—well—you were the one telling me what to do,” Rimmer says feebly, and feels his whole face now burning violently. “I couldn’t have—I wouldn’t have known where to start.”

God, it’s not like Rimmer to be humble—what is _happening_ to him?! Five minutes in the presence of a Lister with a degree in engineering and he forgets all his pomposity and charmless smegginess, and he’s reduced to a gibbering, lovestruck buffoon. He should be basking in the glory and waving to his adoring fans, and instead he keeps his hand on the shoulder of this insufferable, handsome, educated, smiley, handsome Lister and says uselessly, _thank you_ , again because he doesn’t know what else to say, and then— _sorry, thank you._

Lister lets him go and Rimmer wants immediately to sulk.

“I’ll buy you a drink later as proper thanks,” Lister tells him. “Or, hey—you can buy me one. I like Leopard lager but I’m not fussy.”

He winks, and Rimmer feels as disoriented and confused about it as he’d felt about the earlier wink, but before he can seize Lister by the clothes and demand exactly what he’s playing at, Lister has headed off back to his crew to do his actual job and finish repairing the reactor. Apparently, to add insult to injury, this is a Lister who actually cares about doing his job right. Is nothing sacred?!

There are all sorts of bloody things that need sorting and fixing, apparently, while Rimmer floats around feeling like a jettisoned space-rocket shell, and he waits to be told what to do.

Unfortunately, no-one does, although plenty do come up to congratulate the hero of the hour.

It’s not until much later, when catastrophe has been firmly and categorically averted, and Rimmer has calmed down after a good little panic cry in the lavatory, that Captain Rimmer catches up with him again.

The staff of _Red Dwarf_ have been given leave to have a well-earned night off and make their way to Parrots’ Bar for an evening of raucous drinking and general revelry, and the captain falls in beside him, clapping him soundly on the shoulder. “So, I hear you survived the ordeal,” Captain Rimmer declares, sounding almost proud as he talks round the end of a thick Cuban cigar.

Rimmer draws himself up taller. “That I did.”

It’s hard to hate this Rimmer. True, a few realities ago, he would’ve certainly given it his best efforts anyway, but in spite of his self-satisfied, sanctimonious, cigar-smoking, sherry-swirling smarminess—he’s alright. A good captain, perplexingly, and maybe that’s what makes him different to so many of the other Rimmers that he has met. Softer, somehow; more tolerant. More inclined towards, if not laughter, at least a cool smile, and he hasn’t sworn at anyone in forty minutes. Call it a stretch of the imagination perhaps, but Rimmer imagines that this is what he might have looked like if he were content.

“You did a grand job,” Captain Rimmer says. “Invaluable help, really.” He catches sight of someone past Rimmer’s shoulder and lifts a hand to wave over. “Here he is—”

Lister sidles up, bumps into Captain Rimmer’s side like he might already have had a few too many, but the captain only claps a hand to his shoulder to steady him.

“I was just telling Ace here about what you’d been saying earlier,” Captain Rimmer fills Lister in, and Lister grins, totally unabashed. Then the captain looks back to Rimmer. “Positively singing your praises. Said you singlehandedly decoupled and realigned the magnetic mirror. That’s no mean feat, miladdo.”

Rimmer can’t tell whether or not he is being patronised. “Well,” he says, and looks over at Lister. “Of course, I had help.”

“Hey, man, credit where credit’s due,” Lister says, with a little gesture like he’s ducking into a half-hearted curtesy. “The hard bit was all you.”

“Yes, yes, I get it now—you were both wonderful, you were both magnificent, on and on and on,” Captain Rimmer says, and he rolls his eyes. There is nothing unpleasant in his voice, more like a sort of exasperated affection, but it does make Rimmer get hot under the collar anyway at the idea that he is so transparently caught on everything Lister says and does. Whether Captain Rimmer has any thoughts on this, however, is never made clear, as he turns to Rimmer then. “Have you got a drink, Ace?”

The offer is so surprising—and if Rimmer is honest, out of character—that for a moment he only blinks, bewildered. “What—for me? Oh—no, I’ve not. Erm, a dry white, please. Whatever’s cheapest.”

Captain Rimmer nods, and then turns to Lister. “Drink?”

“You’re paying,” Lister tells him.

“Obviously.”

“Go on, then.”

The captain doesn’t even ask what kind of drink Lister actually wants, just strides away through the crowd.

Left alone with Lister, Rimmer fidgets helplessly, shifting his weight from foot to foot. He doesn’t know where to look.

“So,” he says after a beat, at the same instant that Lister says, “How’d you get to be a space superhero, anyway?”

Rimmer pauses. “Oh—I don’t know, really. I mean—well, no, of course I do, but…” He can feel himself floundering, like a stupid smegging idiot. He takes a deep breath and starts again. “I got sort of… headhunted, I suppose. The, erm, the old version of—of the hero—” he says, deciding to try and just evade the Ace Rimmer legacy stuff, “—he came to my universe and recruited me. Trained me up and then—off you pop, you know. Go and save some universes.”

“You’ve saved the universe?” Lister repeats—not in disbelief, but sounding actually quite impressed. “Get away, man.”

“Oh, yes.” Rimmer is warming up to this a bit, now. He rocks on the balls of his feet. “More than once, to tell you the truth. But you don’t want to hear all that.”

“No, I do.” Lister turns to face him head-on. “So, what, do you just flit between universes until you find someone in trouble?”

“Sort of. My ship’s dimension-drive follows me—or the other versions of me—throughout space and time, so I just hop around like that,” Rimmer explains. “Sometimes the other Rimmer will need help—”

“Like we did.”

“Yes, exactly—or sometimes I’ll just cruise through that universe to check everything is running smoothly, you know, tickety-boo and all that.” Rimmer shrugs. “But otherwise I’m just sailing through space being something of a nuisance. Sticking my nose in where it doesn’t belong.”

“Being brave and helpful and handsome,” Lister cuts in with a roll of his eyes. “Oh, yeah, you must be such a drag. I bet they hate having you around as much as we do.”

Rimmer scowls, but he is secretly very pleased, and he is just about to tell Lister more about it when Captain Rimmer flits back with a can of lager for Lister and a glass of white wine for Rimmer.

“There you are,” he says magnanimously, handing the drinks over. “Oh—and by the way, Lister, I hope you don’t mind, I asked them to put it on your tab.”

Lister’s mouth falls open. “You stingy bastard,” he exclaims. “I said _you_ were paying for it—”

“Did you? My mistake, I heard, _please, Rimmer, I insist—no, I demand—that you allow me to—_ ”

“No smegging way, you dirty lying weasel—”

“Must dash,” Captain Rimmer says cheerily, clapping Rimmer on the shoulder as though in solidarity. “I spy some sausage roll canapés with my name on.” And with that, he swans off again, leaving Lister spluttering indignantly in his wake.

Flabbergasted, Rimmer can’t decide whether to be appalled or reluctantly impressed by Lister’s lack of reverence for such an awe-inspiring, fearsome commander. “Surely you can’t get away with talking to him like that, surely,” he says tentatively.

“I can get away with anything I like, really.”

“But…” Rimmer hesitates. “I thought he was a good captain—I thought people respected him.”

“Oh, yeah, he is a good captain, alright,” Lister says mildly. “He’s also a twat.”

Rimmer chokes on his wine.

“Hold on—the cheap git, I can see him having another go—one second,” Lister says, and then threads away through the crowd before Rimmer can respond, and then he is left alone clutching his wineglass like it’s trying to escape.

Smeg. Now what?

He has never been terribly at ease in social situations like this—although he imagines that as Ace, that extroverted sex bomb, he probably should be. He wonders if he should be dancing. Experimentally, he bobs his head to the music, trying to locate the rhythm mostly by trial and error, and then gives up. No, he decides, if it’s not Morris dancing, he isn’t interested. There’s no rigour, no discipline required—no bells!—and it seems, frankly, to be a waste of time.

That doesn’t stop others from enjoying, nor from inviting him to enjoy it, seemingly undeterred by his scowl at the edge of the dance floor. A woman named Linda runs her hands down his lapels and pulls him into the throng of her shimmying friends; another, also inexplicably called Linda, is brazen enough to come up and tell him point-blank, _I don’t have a drink—you should fix that_ , so he does. Vodka lemonade, heavy on the lemonade. He puts it on Lister’s tab--who, he reasons, probably won’t notice another addition from another Rimmer.

Honestly, Rimmer doesn’t know why he keeps turning girls down. He could have one of those sequined women undulating beneath the strobe lights, or that glistening man in tight trousers, or that officious lady in denim—or one of Lindas—or _both_ of them... Any one of these disco freaks would probably sell their firstborn sons for a shot on the Rimmer rodeo. Countless women over the course of the last half hour have come up to offer themselves to him, and yet all he does is get them a drink and extricate himself from the situation before it progresses any further. Usually, he is the keenest party for progressing situations further!

Frankly, this is all kinds of ridiculous. For Rimmer, a literal honest-to-God space hero, Neil Armstrong in fur-trimmed gold, to be nursing a Pinot spritzer and pining for a grubby little caveman a thousand realities away, when there are actual, real, alive human bodies here to have sex with—it’s simply preposterous. It’s inconceivable.

He could have anyone. He _should_ have anyone. He should move on and get his end away, and then maybe that will be all his problems solved.

Rimmer takes a deep breath. Smeg it. _Smeg it. W_ hat the hell is he waiting for?!

In several careful, long sips, Rimmer downs his drink, checks his breath, and strides purposefully over to his target.

“Evening,” he says, his most confident, sexually tantalising voice. “Get your coat—you’ve pulled.”

Lister blinks at him, and then laughs. “Have I?”

Rimmer deflates somewhat at the unexpected response. He had known that, in this one rare instance, the worm-do line wouldn’t work, but he had thought this one was guaranteed. “Yes, you have,” he insists, undeterred, and gets hold of Lister’s sleeve. “Come on.”

“Hey, steady on,” Lister says gently, and he’s still smiling, but his hand is firm when he plucks Rimmer’s hand from his arm and pushes it back to him. “Sorry—not happening, handsome.”

For a moment, Rimmer is so dumbfounded that he can’t speak. He just gawps, open-mouthed, at Lister, trying to understand. This makes absolutely no sense. It’s one thing when an alternate Lister thinks he’s a prick and hates his guts, which does happen with some regularity—but he should have had this Lister in the bag! “But—what? We—you were—I thought— _why_?”

Lister gives him a sort of pitying look, as though he thinks Rimmer is massively slow on the uptake. “I mean, yeah, I was chatting you up a bit, but I thought you knew it wasn’t going anywhere. You know I’m married, man.”

Rimmer did not know that.

His mouth is sort of helplessly half-open. After a moment of wrestling with himself, he manages, “Married.”

Lister lifts his left hand, wiggling his fingers, and sure enough, there’s a ring—but there’s also about twenty-thousand other rings on every finger, and unless Lister is the universe’s most talented polygamist, that doesn’t necessarily mean anything either.

“Married,” Rimmer says again, appalled, testing the word out. “But— _how?!”_

“Hey, cheers for the vote of confidence,” Lister says sarcastically. “Anyway, I’m not the one to ask—you’re the one who popped the question.”

That makes even less sense. Rimmer hasn’t asked anything. Idiotically, he says, “I was only after a shag.”

Lister rolls his eyes. “Smegging hell—not _you-_ you, but you know…” He trails off with a meaningful arch of his eyebrows.

“Wait—” The last piece slides into place, like a six-piece jigsaw completed upside down. “No. Rimmer?” he says in disbelief. “As in Captain Rimmer. Captain _Arnold_ Rimmer. You’ve actually—you married _me_?”

The emotional response to this information catches him completely off-guard. He feels as though he has eaten some particularly questionable seafood. His stomach pitches up; his heart drops; his brain goes to putty; his respiratory system is anybody’s guess.

“Didn’t even have to twist your arm or nothing,” Lister says cheerily, and Rimmer wonders whether it is possible to have an allergic reaction to someone else’s good news.

“And you… said yes,” Rimmer says, slow, trying to understand. “You actually—” The countless questions that this information poses are more than Rimmer can wrap his head around. In the end, all he manages to articulate is, “When?”

Lister eyes him. “Rimmer’s not put you up to this, has he?” he says with suspicion. “’Cause I do know when our anniversary is. I’m not getting in trouble again—I do remember when it is, but I just don’t think it matters right this second, because it’s not today.” He pauses. “No, it’s not today,” he says, almost to himself. “He’d have killed me by breakfast.”

For some reason, this addition is what hammers it home. There is a lot in this universe which is strange and foreign, but that—Lister reflecting serenely on the things that will drive Rimmer to try and murder him, with fondness and warmth in his voice—is familiar.

“Three years married, though,” Lister tells him. “He once tried to get me transferred to a different JMC ship so as not to _undermine his authority_ and _risk incidents of unprofessionalism_ , but I changed his mind on that pretty quick.”

Judging by Lister’s smirk, it is fairly easy to infer what exactly was held over the other Rimmer to get him to knuckle under.

Great. Great! Absolutely fan-smegging-tastic.

“Well,” Rimmer says, his voice strangled. “Good. Congratulations.” He gives a curt, awkward nod. “How wonderful for you both. Bravo.”

Lister pulls a sort of helpless grimace. “Sorry. But I mean, you are my type, if that helps at all.”

“Thanks,” Rimmer says stiffly. “It doesn’t.”

For a moment, an uncomfortable silence stretches between them, where Lister is clearly casting about for something to say, and Rimmer is just staring vacantly at Lister’s drink and wondering whether he can drown himself in half an inch of lager.

“Well,” Rimmer says at last, before Lister can try and make him feel better about it. “I’d better—I’ve got to, er—bye.”

Rimmer turns away with no further explanation, and, with the gait of a man with a secret skidmark, he walks stiffly away.

Christ. How can this be possible? The layers of humiliation are so myriad here that he doesn’t know where to start:

  * He could’ve had anyone, and he went for Lister;
  * Lister turned him down;
  * Because he’s _married_ —someone _actually wanted to marry_ that idiotic speck of sputum, to hook their life up to his, until death do they part;
  * It was Rimmer. _Rimmer_ was the one who wanted that, with Lister, forever;
  * It’s a different Rimmer and a different Lister, like Rimmer is now the sad invitee to the bridal party of his own smegging romance, like an out-of-body experience of how he could be happy, if only, if only.



Rimmer kicks a wall. It hurts his foot and changes nothing.

He _hates_ this Rimmer—this self-satisfied, sanctimonious, cigar-smoking, sherry-swirling, smarmy bastard, who thinks he’s so much better than everyone else, who thinks that just because he’s Captain of a JMC mining vessel by forty-five and married and happy, that gives him the right to figuratively defecate on everyone else from on high.

Of course, there’s nothing to stop Rimmer from just going off with somebody else; all the previous candidates are still out there and having a great time, probably ready to climb into bed with Ace at the drop of a hat if he just keeps up his stupid stoic, manly machismo act. But Rimmer doesn’t know what to do if he doesn’t want to _be_ Ace. He wants to stop pretending. He wants to give up. He wants to go home.

As he slopes off, he turns over every moment, every word, every glance, that he has seen between this Rimmer and Lister since he arrived in this reality, and tries to parse out at least one where he should have noticed how alien things were, how belligerently, outspokenly in love these alternates were. Try as he might, he’s coming up empty—not because of a lack of love there, but just because it’s the same stupid thing he’s seen a thousand times before. That’s just how Lister and Rimmer look at each other; how they gravitate towards each other’s orbits. Nothing new, nothing strange.

Shit. _Shit._

Rimmer likes to think that since becoming Ace he has become at least slightly less cowardly—but still cowardly enough to escape without saying goodbye to anyone.

He doesn’t even bother making his excuses, except to anyone who tries to accost him en-route— _sorry, got to go, have an appointment in another dimension, can’t dilly-dally or I might miss it, you know how important it is to be punctual—_ and he makes a beeline for the hangar.

On the way, he spots Todhunter-not-Todhunter, who he does spare a moment for—he sticks his middle finger up at him and thoroughly relishes Todhunter’s look of offended bewilderment.

Well, he reflects, as he stalks back towards _Wildfire_ , one thing at least is certain—he can’t tell Molly about this. It would be too mortifying.

“So,” Molly starts, loud and innocent, as soon as Rimmer climbs back into the cockpit. “Little birdy tells me you struck out.”

“Oh, for smeg’s sake,” Rimmer exclaims, and tries to get back out again.

“What is it with you and Dave Lister?” Molly wonders aloud as she locks the cockpit doors every time Rimmer goes for the handle. “I mean, is it the size of the boat, or the motion of the ocean?”

“We are not discussing this,” Rimmer says firmly, which is apparently the wrong thing to say.

“Ooh, so it _is_ about the sex!” she crows.

Rimmer drags a hand down over his face. “Look, I’m just—used to him, alright?” he says, which is a feeble excuse but he’s sticking with it. “I know he’s good at it, and I like to think I’m relatively good at—at _him._ You know. What buttons, and so on.” He can feel his face getting hotter by the second. “I mean, why shoot higher and risk fumbling it? If you’ve a dinky, reliable old bicycle and someone offers you the keys to a Porsche—” He hesitates. “Alright, bad example.”

“Hell’s bells—alright, I’ll let you go on pedalling round Silverstone circuit,” Molly teases. “I’ll see you at the finish line.”

Rimmer sighs. “Engage the dimension-drive, Molly.”

“Really puts a new meaning on the term _ship’s bike,_ doesn’t it?”

“Molly—”

“Right, come on, then, Eddy Merckx—”

“ _Molly_!”

“Alright, alright… let’s see where we’re headed now.”

“Somewhere we’re he’s not smegging married, preferably,” Rimmer mutters, buckling himself in.

Molly gasps, scandalised. “No! He wasn’t.”

“It sounds unlikelier than a hog roast at a Bar Mitzvah, I know, but tragically, it’s true,” Rimmer starts in mournful tones, and then they are zapped away through space and time.

***


	4. Chapter 4

**CHAPTER FOUR**

_Dear Diary,_

_989 DAYS – Found a Curly Wurly under the pilot’s seat. From a peremptory squeeze through the packaging, it does seem to be in mostly good shape, although of course there is no telling how many centuries this thing has been in here. I am not going to eat it. I am going to save it, in a side compartment, for the day when I need to end my life in agony and can’t remember where I put the cyanide._

***

In hindsight, there is something to be said for Lister’s dogged persistence and stubborn refusal to give up on something he wants to have sex with. Rimmer has never really considered before how much work Lister used to put in during their time together—not until Rimmer is stranded in a series of universes in which Lister is casually interested in him but not inasmuch as being actively in pursuit or willing to make the first move, and Rimmer feels like he’s fifteen again and trying to find someone to go to the Christmas Gala with him, preferably without being sick on him as he asks.

In fact, it’s even worse than the Gala debacle, because part of the trouble is that Rimmer doesn’t even really know what he’s asking for. _Hey, would you like to have dinner in the ship’s canteen? Do you fancy having sex with me at some point? Would you like a fumble and a roll in your bunk?_ God, it feels pathetic.

Lister leans forwards slightly into his space. “ _Red Dwarf_ to Rimmer, you alright?”

Rimmer blinks and jerks upright. “What—no—yes, I’m fine. I was just—just—erm—just—”

Oh God. Oh _God._ Rimmer is sweating behind the ears.

“You said that you had something to ask me,” this universe’s Lister prompts, drumming his fingers on the back of the nearby chair. The science room seems far too loud between them, humming and buzzing and blinking in a way that heightens Rimmer’s blood pressure dangerously. “Remember?”

It shouldn’t be this difficult—but then, Rimmer has become somewhat accustomed to a very particular Lister who is indulgent of his quirks and endeared by at least a few of his flaws and usually willing to meet him halfway. Now, however, there’s the barrier of this Lister’s internalised contempt for him, plus the fact that Rimmer is the poor silly bugger left doing all the heavy lifting here.

He clears his throat and tries again.

“You did a good job repairing the radiator vanes,” Rimmer tells him earnestly, anxiously, wringing his hands together. “I mean—not that I thought—it’s just that I was worried you might—that—well. But it went well. You did well. You were—good.” It sticks in Rimmer’s throat. He can feel his ears burning. “You were good.”

Lister’s mouth tilts up at the corner in this small, pleased smile.

Rimmer can’t look directly at him for too long. “So, erm. Thank you.”

Opening his mouth, Lister is about to respond, but whatever there is between them—maddening lust, etc—Rimmer never gets to find out, because it is shattered by an insufferable, whiny, nasal voice.

“Oh, dearie me. I must have forgotten to buy tickets for the Pathetic Moron Convention,” the other Rimmer says loudly, in a voice that makes Rimmer wants to kick him through the airlock. “Well, no matter, I’m sure can catch up on whatever I miss in the next edition of Twinks R Us Monthly.”

Rimmer closes his eyes in agony.

_Theoretically_ , there’s nothing all that wrong with this universe’s Rimmer—in the same way that there’s usually nothing _theoretically_ wrong with any of the Rimmers—but he’s just sort of a twat. He’s unpleasant to everyone. To Lister, to the Chinchilla—this reality’s equivalent of the Cat—as well as Crouton—take a wild guess—but above all else, to Rimmer. He is snidey and rude and petty and condescending, and so far he has spent all his time glowering at Rimmer with his arms folded across his chest, and Rimmer hasn’t even been that horrible to him. He has _nothing_ to deserve this foul-tempered mistreatment. Somehow, in spite of this, in spite of Rimmer’s excellent behaviour, at every turn there is the other Rimmer, glaring and sneering and being unpleasant. More than anything, he is especially good at hanging around like a bad smell whenever Rimmer is trying to talk to Lister one-on-one.

This time, Lister takes point on managing the other Rimmer; he turns his head and says mildly, “Smeg off and die.”

The other Rimmer gives a thin, glib smile without any humour behind it. “Way ahead of you. I’m just en-route to take a bath with a toaster now, in fact.”

“Do remember to plug it in, won’t you?” Rimmer tells him. “I’d hate for you to fail at that like you’ve failed at everything else.”

The other Rimmer balks, affronted. “Unbelievable—Lister, are you listening to this? The insult, the indignity of it—”

“Rimmer, shut up,” Lister says, and the vicious thrill of glee through Rimmer, at his side, is intoxicating. “Go iron your socks or rearrange your shoe-tree or something, that’ll calm you right down. Tape a new picture of me to the dart board.”

The other Rimmer’s lip curls. “I see how it is,” he says coldly. “One day of Hugh Hefner over here, and he’s got you eating out of his latex gloves. Well, far be it from me to get in the way of whatever oily, exciting fun you had planned for this evening. If you do happen to need me, ’ll be in my bunk, looking at photographs of _women_.”

This last part is said pointedly, with a narrow-eyed look, and Rimmer resists the urge to add that confessing to an evening of masturbating alone is not the scalding retort that he thinks it is—but by then, the other Rimmer is storming away down the corridor. Lister watches him go.

“Christ, I thought he’d never leave,” Rimmer says.

“Hm?” Lister looks over. “Oh—yeah.”

After a beat of silence in which Rimmer fidgets and feels he has missed something, he tries, “Shall we head back and quadruple-check the radiation shield? Just to check that nothing’s going to catch fire, or…”

“Good idea. Lead the way, man,” Lister says, and he looks over his shoulder in the direction the other Rimmer disappeared before they carry on.

It isn’t until much later than Rimmer summons enough courage to try again. He tries to reassure himself that there is no reason it needs to be this difficult—he and Lister have been chatting away happily for much of the day, and not even at each other’s throats very often, although a large part of that is because Lister seems to be constantly at the _other_ Rimmer’s throat instead and expending all of his aggression there. Either way, Lister and Rimmer are getting along swimmingly, and every now and then he has caught Lister eyeing him up, so this should be easy.

This should be easy.

Deep breaths. In and out. He can do this. He has loads of his best pick-up lines still up his sleeve which he’s not tried yet, and there are a few that he thinks Lister would really like.

“Hey,” Rimmer says, in a voice so casual that it actually hurts his larynx a bit. “Lister. Have—have you felt my jacket?”

Lister looks up with a frown from where he is taking apart some old tech with a hammer and all the careful precision of a freight train hitting a deer. “Your jacket?” he says incredulously. “Can’t say I have, no.”

Smeg. That’s not the right—never mind. Rimmer shakes it off and persists. “Well, I think you should feel it.”

“Are you trying to sell it to me?”

“No, I just—” For God’s sake. This isn’t going right at all. “Look, will you just—just come and feel it, will you?”

Lister seems no less perplexed, but he obediently sets down hammer and mechanism. He comes up and reaches up to smooth a hand over Rimmer’s shoulder. “Yeah, alright. What am I looking at, here?”

Here we go. Rimmer can still recover this. “What it’s made of,” he tells him.

Lister’s eyebrows lift. “What is it made of?”

_Yes,_ smegging _finally_! Jackpot. Rimmer is near vibrating with delight—what a punchline to deliver—and then in walks the other Rimmer, and Lister’s hand falls away from Rimmer’s shoulder. He is still looking expectantly at him though, and Rimmer fumbles, “Erm—well—polyester, mostly, I think.”

“Oh, right.” Lister gives a little nod, no less perplexed, and pushes his hands into his pockets. He looks across the room at the cursed bloody intruder. “You alright, Rimmer?”

“Fine,” the other Rimmer replies sourly. “I’m not interrupting, am I?”

“Yes,” Rimmer says, at the same moment that Lister says, “No, you’re fine.”

They look at each other.

The other Rimmer tuts and shakes his head, arms folded across his chest. “Dear, dear, what a shame—trouble in Paradise already?”

It’s infuriating, his dismissive scorn, but more infuriating still is how Lister gets wound up by it and bites back, “Oh, shut up, Rimmer,” and skulks off to the drive room, and that’s it—conversation over. No chance that Rimmer will get him alone again any time soon, much less in circumstances where Rimmer will be able to pluck up the strength to chat him up. Christ, why is this so difficult?

The other Rimmer follows Lister, already starting up some pathetic, inane whinging, and Rimmer is left alone in the midsection, feeling utterly stupid. He looks down, plucks at his flight suit, and mutters, “Boyfriend material.”

What a waste of time.

His next shot comes a few hours later when the crisis is largely averted and they’re in the clean-up stages. Rimmer is running maintenance checks on Holly, the Chinchilla has scarpered—obviously—and Crouton is preparing something for tea, so it’s just Lister and Rimmer restoring some semblance of order to the engine room after the chaos earlier. All of their equipment, crates and crates of it, was shunted aside or heaved upside or stacked four high to try and minimise how much was damaged by the asteroid storm, but now things need to be put right again.

Normally, Rimmer would be cross at having been dragged into something this mundane, especially when it isn’t even his mess in the first place, but for once he relishes it as an opportunity get Lister alone.

Now, all he needs to do is not cock this up.

Easier said than done.

Rimmer counts _three, two, one_ with Lister to heave a particularly heavy box up, and they share the weight to carefully lift it down the narrow metal stairs to the store room. As they shunt it into its proper position, Rimmer counts down _three, two, one_ in his head again, ready to ask Lister out, and—doesn’t.

“I think there’s just one more of those big ones up there,” Lister says, and jerks his head in the direction of the stairs. “Give us a hand again?”

Rimmer gives a curt nod. “Certainly.”

They head up the stairs together and Rimmer follows behind him, trying hard not to look at Lister’s arse—alright, he’s not trying _that_ hard—and psyching himself up. Come on, Arnold. This should be easy. This should be _easy._

He feels like he might be sick.

Together they reach the crate in question, bend, hook fingers underneath, _three, two, one_ , and up. As they pick their way carefully back towards the stairs, before Rimmer can overthink it, he bursts out, “Have a question.”

Lister lifts his head. “Shoot.”

Oh, God. Rimmer wasn’t actually expecting to get this far. “So I was, er wondering if you—if you—” he stammers and then completely forgets the script that he has been discreetly memorising all this time. He instead turns into a stressed-out child, standing at a Mr. Whippy van with no clue of what he planned to order along with the selective amnesia of forgetting every single ice-cream he has ever seen. “If you wanted, er—”

“Wanted…?”

Rimmer is sweating. His grip on the crate is becoming increasingly tenuous. “Erm—wanted to, to, to, potentially—if you want to, of course, but not if—it doesn’t have to be a big—well. Doesn’t have to be anything really if you didn’t want to—”

“Want to what?” _God,_ Lister is trying so hard to lead him there, nodding along in encouragement as they heave the crate down the stairs again.

“To—to—erm—” Rimmer’s fingers are slipping. He laughs nervously. “Hot in here, isn’t it?”

“I s’pose.” Lister studies him. “Is that really what you wanted to ask?”

“What? Yes—I mean, no! No, it’s not.” Together they reach the storeroom. “It was—it was whether—smeg—”

Rimmer drops the crate. It lands solidly on his foot.

To his credit, Rimmer doesn’t cry. He doesn’t swear—or even make a sound at all, for that matter. He just silently sinks to the floor, keeling over the crate in mortified agony.

“Smegging hell, man, you alright?” Lister hurries to lift the crate off him and, with a grunt, shoves it haphazardly aside. “You’ve not broken anything, have you?

More than anything, what hurts is Rimmer’s pride. He manages something like a smile through locked jaw and gritted teeth, and says, “Do you want to get a drink after this?”

“God, I’d want a drink, too, after that,” Lister says, with a commiserating grimace. “Yeah, go on. I’ve got nothing else on, tonight, so why not?”

It’s not the overwhelming declaration of enthusiasm for which Rimmer was hoping, but he’ll take it.

Later, when Rimmer has got over the pain in his foot—reminding himself intermittently that he’s hardlight, he _can’t_ break any bones, even if it certainly does feel as though his body is giving its very best effort to approximate it—and everything is all fixed and tidy, they head to Parrots bar.

On the way, Rimmer exerts all his mental concentration on not tripping over and is therefore barely listening to a word that Lister is saying. He only tunes in when he realises that the others have been invited—Crouton, the Chinchilla, and worst of all, like some cruel, sick joke, the _other_ _Rimmer._

For _smeg’s sake._ Somehow this seductive invitation has been sorely misread.

It’s not a bad evening, all said. Rimmer drinks white wine and the Chinchilla trembles in a corner and Crouton is irritatingly over-attentive, polishing their glasses every time they are set down, and Lister puts his hand on Rimmer’s elbow when he’s telling an obscene joke, and Rimmer’s skin goes to static. His pulse beats in his stomach and he is more nervous that he can say. At one point, when Lister grins at him, Rimmer tries to smile back with a mouthful of wine and leaks it out of the corner of his mouth. Oh _God._

Lister doesn’t seem to mind, however. He just laughs and touches Rimmer’s arm again, and he looks over at the other Rimmer as he laughs, and it is difficult to deny that there is a not entirely unpleasant proprietary jolt through Rimmer as he watches his doppelganger flush hot, furious purple, and down his Pinot spritzer.

There is a refill to Rimmer’s glass and Lister shotguns a lager with more mess than success, and the other Rimmer is scowling over his wine, and the Chinchilla is carefully shredding bar napkins into a dense little nest on the bar top. To tell the truth, it’s been a long time since Rimmer let himself come anywhere close to relaxing, and it is nice to just take a breather, even if Rimmer does feel on the verge of an aneurysm every time Lister so much as looks at him, even if the other Rimmer is continually trying to disembowel him by telepathy.

Thankfully, it doesn’t last. As the night dwindles on, they start heading in for the night, dispersing to bunks and to _Wildfire_ respectively. Rimmer walks with Lister along the winding monochromatic corridors of Red Dwarf, shoulders knocking, arms swinging loose and easy at their sides so that knuckles grazes against knuckle. When Rimmer’s hand bumps Lister’s again, he pulls away with more force than is required, stumbles sideways, bumps the wall—and Lister, bursting out with a laugh, grabs him by the arm and tries to steer him straight.

“Smegging hell, are you gonna be alright to fly?” Lister exclaims.

“Oh, I’ll be fine,” Rimmer says with a dismissive flap of the hand. “It’s deep space, what am I gonna hit?”

“You’ve got a dimension-drive on board,” Lister says incredulously. “I’m not usually a stickler for the rules, me, but I do feel like you should probably be at least a little bit careful with that one.”

“Pssshhh,” Rimmer says, shaking his head. “Psshhhh, no—no, no, I’ll be alright. Look at me, I’m a superhero.”

Lister’s grin widens. “Yeah, yeah, you’re a superhero who can’t stand up straight.”

“I could fly that thing in my sleep,” Rimmer insists. “Besides, I’ve got autopilot. I’ll be alright, but then again, if it’s that big an issue—” His head is spinning with the wine and the proximity of Lister, hand on his elbow, the lessening space between them. His heart is jackhammering against his ribs. If he could get the words out, it would be the smoothest and most seductive he’s ever been in his life, but at the moment, he is having trouble with even breathing in and out. “I could—I—”

Lister looks up at him. His hand is still on Rimmer’s arm, and Rimmer spots the exact moment that Lister registers what Rimmer is working up to.

He swallows. His fingers go loose on Rimmer’s sleeve, although his hand doesn’t drop away. His eyes flick—only for a split-second—to Rimmer’s mouth and up again.

Rimmer’s mouth is dry. “I could,” he tries again, and his voice is a rasp, and he gets no further. “I—”

Lister’s hand falls from Rimmer’s arm. His fingers trail over Rimmer’s wrist.

Rimmer leans in and kisses him. In the middle of a hallway, between the lifts and the women’s loos, Rimmer’s hand finds Lister’s shoulder and he kisses him—shaky and slow, and then properly.

Lister cups a hand round the back of Rimmer’s neck to pull his head down, and then his other hand is on Rimmer’s waist to pull him closer. Rimmer is all at once a thousand percent fired up and ready to go, and simultaneously terrified of going any further. Lister’s mouth is warm and open, and the press of his tongue lights sparks along Rimmer’s spine, and Rimmer feels dizzy with it. He wants him, wants to flatten his palms to Lister’s skin and suck at the hollow of his throat and kiss him until his mouth goes numb. He wants to kiss him until his body forgets how to do anything else. He wants to kiss him until he stops aching.

Then, out of nowhere, Lister breaks away, using his hands on Rimmer to hold him at arms’ length, and he doesn’t look at him.

“Sorry—no, I’m—” Lister’s words are jumbled together and nonsensical. He shuts his eyes and takes a deep breath. “I’m not—I can’t. Sorry.”

Rimmer blinks, trying to re-engage his brain to catch up with what is happening. “What?” he asks, before he can think about what to say, and comes out sounding like the whiniest and most petulant brat in all known universes. “Why not?”

Lister gives a short laugh and drags his hands down over his face. “I’m not—”

“If you’re able to say that you don’t drive in my lane, so to speak, that’s absolute poppycock,” Rimmer cuts across, his mouth fuelled by—well, it’s not his brain with its foot on the pedal, that’s for certain. “I’ve been to a lot of universes and I’ve met a lot of Listers, and you like men. Almost always. And—and—quite often, to be honest, you like men that look like me, and we’re good at having sex, if that’s what you’re worried about. I’m not good at much but I am quite good at that—at—with you, at least. It helps that I’ve had—well, it’s not important. But you and I—”

“No, I know, I know all of that,” Lister says. He lifts his head. “Actually—hang on. No, not all of that. Did you say that you—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Rimmer interrupts, embarrassed. “Whatever you thought you heard—you didn’t. Look, just ignore me.”

“You’ve shagged me before?”

Rimmer opens his mouth and closes it again. After a beat, he says delicately, “Sort of.”

“So, what is this, then?” Lister asks, and he waves a hand vaguely between them. “You just—collecting another one for the set?”

“No, it’s not like that,” Rimmer says, and then tries to imagine explaining that the real reason is because he is desperately, humiliatingly in love with the Lister from his own universe, and he thinks that actually the idea that he is collecting Listers is actually the better option. “Well. Maybe it is.”

Lister rolls his shoulders as though shaking something off. “Okay, well, leave me out of your weird trophy case,” he says. “I’m not interested.”

Rimmer doesn’t want to push his luck here, but… He looks Lister pointedly up and down. “I mean.”

Looking somehow more annoyed than ever, Lister takes another step back from him and straightens his clothes. “That’s a coincidence,” he says sourly.

“You’re just looking for excuses, now,” Rimmer says. “If you don’t want to sleep with me, then just say so.”

“I don’t want to sleep with you,” Lister says firmly. “There? The only reason I was even—anything, was just… stupid. Trying to make someone jealous. It doesn’t matter.”

Rimmer stares at him. “What?”

Lister raises his eyebrows.

It takes Rimmer a moment to understand, but when he does, it hits him like a volleyball to the face. “Wait—Rimmer?” he says incredulously. “You’re—you—oh, for _fuck’s_ sake.”

“The smeg is your problem?” Lister snaps. “Why is it so shocking that I like Rimmer? I mean— _you’re_ Rimmer, so—”

“Yes, but I’m better,” Rimmer insists. “Better-looking, better-experienced, better everything! You’re not supposed to like _him_. He’s—he’s useless and terrible and bad at everything.”

“Oh, yeah—and you’re so clearly Mr. Charming and Likable.”

“I think I could be, if you gave me a chance.”

“I wouldn’t give you a chance if we were playing Monopoly and I was the banker,” Lister tells him flatly.

Well, that just hurts Rimmer’s feelings.

“I’m going to bed,” Lister says. “On me own. Alone. Without you.”

Rimmer lets out his breath. “Right.”

“And if you aren’t safe to fly, then I’m sure there’s a bit of corrugated iron somewhere you can curl up under.” Lister waves a vague, dismissive hand. “Or a furnace to crawl into.”

“Okay.” Rimmer straightens his jacket awkwardly. Then, in a spark of insane courage from unknown depths, he says, “And—hypothetically—if you were to change your mind, where would I—”

“I won’t,” Lister interrupts, and with that, he turns and he slopes away down the corridor.

Bollocks. Bollocking shitting pissing wank.

Call him self-deprecating, but Rimmer can’t help but feel that one might have been his fault.

***

“Would you rather,” Rimmer starts, slow and measured, “have hands for feet, or feet for hands?”

Molly points out, “Well, I’ve got neither so it seems a bit moot point, really,” and Rimmer swears at her.

They are currently travelling through a time vortex, which looks nothing like what Rimmer was led to expect from Doctor Who, and more like the inside of a Quality Street wrapper. By Molly’s estimate, it will take them just under three days to reach the other side, and by hour five, Rimmer is already bored.

“Oh, come on, you know what I mean,” he says crossly. “If not for you, then for the general populace. What do you think—hands for feet or feet for hands?”

Molly considers this. “Are the feet really dextrous or just regular feet?”

“What do you mean? How dextrous?”

“Like, do they have a bendy digit that you could use to, you know, manipulate things?”

“What, like an opposable thumb?”

“Well, now that you mention it—”

“That’s just a hand, Molly, and that’s cheating.”

“You’re no fun.”

“I’m no fun? You’re the one not taking this seriously—”

“Oh, Lord, forgive me… for not taking seriously enough the question about which limbs that I’ll never have I would prefer. Tell you what, Mr. Human Being Supremacist, let’s have a go at this one—would you rather have a hundred terabytes of RAM, or a thousand terabytes of ROM?”

“Oh, the ROM. Absolutely. Definitely not the RAM.”

Molly gives him a flat look. “Really.”

“Oh, yes,” Rimmer says, folding his arms. “No, I’ve never really trusted sheep. Always feel like they’re up to something.”

This time, it is Molly’s turn to swear at him, loudly and at length. Rimmer can feel himself automatically smiling back at her, an awkwardly pleasant expression while he doesn’t know what to do with his hands. After she has finished calling him a _pathetic smeg-talking mucosal cough_ , amongst other things, he reaches out to fiddle with the dial for the heating.

There is quiet between them, nothing but the hum of the engines as they coast through time, the jittering tap of Rimmer’s bouncing foot against the floor. He sucks his teeth and inspects a smudge at the knee of his flight suit. He checks the time. He checks their speed. He checks their fuel. His foot keeps bouncing.

Molly clears her throat. “A hundred meerkat-sized sharks, or one shark-sized meerkat?”

***

_Dear Diary,_

_1264 DAYS ? Ish? – Unfortunately, that’s the thing about skipping through time and space. After a certain point, it does get difficult to keep track of where and when exactly you are. We keep jumping to separate universes with relatively low-level issues to resolve and then moving on quick—and so it’s been Wednesday four days in a row this week. If I hear anyone say, ‘at least it’s hump day!’ again, I am going to violently eviscerate them with a rusty spoon._

_Part of me thinks I should be keeping track by carving days onto the wall of_ Wildfire _or something, but that does feel rather dramatic and somewhat too_ Shawshank _for my liking._

***

Finally, smegging _finally,_ here is a Lister who actually fancies him, who isn’t deterred by Rimmer’s general Rimmer-ness, who seems to be onboard with a bit of the old interdimensional horizontal tango, and Rimmer has been chomping at the metaphorical bit for nearly eight months now.

Lister moves in to kiss him and Rimmer meets him halfway. He gets Lister’s face in two hands, hauls him up on tiptoe, and kisses him hard, all urgency and little finesse. Lister is everywhere, his hands grabbing at Rimmer’s hips, his arse, pulling him closer, and Rimmer just can’t stop kissing him. The shape of his jaw is slightly different under Rimmer’s palms, there’s a little scar under his chin that Rimmer’s own Lister doesn’t share, but it’s close enough that Rimmer is clinging to him and can’t let go.

Lister is all go, tugging at the hem of Rimmer’s jacket then, tongue in his mouth, fingers insistent at his belt; Rimmer cradles Lister’s face in his hands, Lister’s ears caught between his knuckles, and his heart is beating high in his throat, and he thinks he might fall down.

Lister sucks at his bottom lip, gets a fist threaded through the back of Rimmer’s hair in a way that makes his breath hiss and his hips jump. Then Lister pulls back with a wicked grin, and he makes the fatal mistake of speaking.

“I say, shall we get this show on the road, then, lovely?”

It’s so jarring that for a moment Rimmer can only blink at him, disoriented as an amateur mountaineer. “What?”

“I mean, I do hope we are still on the same page, as it were,” Lister says, the plummy round vowels in his mouth less bewildering than a top hat full of eels, but only just. He tilts back and straightens his crisp polo shirt. “Because I must say, I’ve been awfully keen to get into your trousers.”

“Oh—no, I—I mean, yes,” Rimmer fumbles, and in spite of the reassurance, he lets go of Lister’s face. “Yes, we are on the same page. It’s just—” He hesitates. He doesn’t know if there’s a polite way to ask Lister to stop talking and still go to bed with him afterwards. “It’s hard to explain.”

“Oh, come along, darling,” Lister says warmly, perfectly enunciated, and Rimmer actually winces.

“Sorry, Lister, I just—”

“Please, call me David.”

Rimmer wants to lob himself out the window. “Look,” he says, and then trails off and gets no further. He fits his hand to Lister’s— _David’s_ —jaw again, and as his thumb graze the corner of David’s mouth, it strikes him that there _is_ at least one tried and tested method to shut him up. However, when Rimmer presses the tip of his thumb, experimentally, to Lister’s lower lip, Lister pulls his head back with a frown.

“Sorry, lovely,” Lister says. “Just—terribly unhygienic, you know?”

Rimmer throws both hands up in the air and gives up. “I can’t do this.”

Lister’s frowns deepens. “I say! Whatever seems to be the matter?”

“This just won’t work,” Rimmer declares, rubbing an open hand down over his face. “You’re just—you’re—you’re _nice_ and you’re clean and clever and well-brought up—”

“Is that a bad thing?” Lister asks, incredulous.

“You wouldn’t think so, would you?” Rimmer bursts out. “Those do seem to be universally laudable traits, no? But alas, I am broken, intrinsically somewhere, for reasons I cannot fathom, and so this just will not do.”

“Well.” Lister seems to take this in, considering. “Alright, then. Do you fancy watching some zero-gravity polo with me?”

“No, thanks,” Rimmer tells him flatly, “I’m going to go and find a dirty tea-towel to wank off into, and then I’m going to kill myself,” and with that, he heads off to sulk.

***

“Why does the universe hate me?” Rimmer asks, around a mouthful of granola that he is eating dry from the bag. “I mean, what did I do wrong? What ill-omened stars were aligned at my birth to curse me to such a pathetic, meandering, useless, smeggy existence?”

Molly makes a gently sympathetic noise. “Oh, Arnold. You spend too long looking in the mirror again?”

Rimmer ignores this. “I just don’t think it’s fair,” he goes on. “I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that I have, on the whole, been dealt a crappier hand than most—”

“Yeah,” Molly says. “I’ve always heard what a difficult time rich white toffs have of it.”

“—between my stupid nobby parents, my brothers, my terrible schooling at Io House—”

“Io House is one of the best schools in the solar system.”

“—my luck with women, or lack thereof, my _death—_ ”

“Which you caused, if I remember correctly. Through your own ineptitude.”

“—and just when things start looking up— _whoops, sorry, Arnold, time to save the universe_. All my life, I’ve been miserable and bitter and alone—”

“Really mixing things up now, by comparison.”

“—and now I just start figuring it all out, you know—sex, love… algebra, sometimes—and it’s all over.” Rimmer sits back heavily in his seat. “If Ace had shown up, say, five years earlier, then I’d say bring it on. Heroics, glory, legacy—it’s everything I would’ve wanted. Certainly would’ve shut my father up about being such a sodding failure. He couldn’t even get in the bloody Space Corps, let alone being an intergalactic superhero.”

“Sounds like you’ve got it all sorted, then.”

Rimmer doesn’t answer.

It’s ridiculous to the point of being laughable, how he misses Lister with every atom. With his every bloody photon of light. Falling in love for seven idiotic, agonising, stupid smegging years, and then he doesn’t even get to enjoy the spoils of war because the galaxy needs someone Ace-adjacent to save the world. Well, he doesn’t want to save the world. He doesn’t want glory—he wants to order around his subordinates and sleep in late in the morning and read his books and kiss Lister whenever it pleases him.

He realises that he has now been away from Lister longer than they had ever been together. By this point, he probably has skin cells that Lister has never even touched. Does it make any sense, mooning after someone who slept with a handful of times, someone you’d only been romantically entangled with for just over a year? He’s had rashes that lasted longer than his time with Lister. It is insane, then, to pin his heart and all his hopes on him.

“Have you run out of steam?” Molly asks, about as kindly as a taxidermist with a fox that won’t stop struggling. “Gimme a tic, I’ve got some Celine Dion I can blast if you need some more fuel for your Pity Pageant.”

“Oh, smeg off,” Rimmer snaps. “You’re just an overgrown Etch-a-Sketch with the personality of cold bacon grease—what would you know about it? What would you know about anything? You have no idea what this feels like—”

“I mean,” Molly says loudly, cutting over him, “I think I’ve got more idea than most.”

Rimmer runs abruptly out of steam. The last of his breath comes in one harsh exhalation, his shoulders slumping, and he stares at her screen without speaking.

Molly raises her eyebrows. “Been here since the start, remember?” she says, and her voice is sharp but not totally unkind. “Since Ace 1.0. Gotta be honest—no-one’s quite matched up to him yet. Still, another eight-hundred thousand and maybe I’ll find someone promising.”

It is hard to know what to say to this.

Rimmer is not entirely confident what the relationship was between Molly and Ace—sometimes she talks about him as though she was in love, while other times she seems oddly maternal, reminiscing on the little things she had to help him with and how proud she’d been watching him grow and mature into to the superhero everyone now knows and loathes—but he knows, at least, that she understands.

Quietly, Rimmer asks, “Does it hurt less now? Than it did at the start, I mean.”

Molly hums, a sort of non-committal noise. “Mostly, yeah. Sometimes no.”

Rimmer clicks his tongue in irritation. “Precise and informative as ever, Molly. Thank you.”

“I dunno what you want me to say here,” she replies. “It was thousands of years ago. How do you feel about the burning of the Library of Alexandria?”

Rimmer thinks about this. “Bit cross,” he says at last. “Not all that fussed mostly. There were probably weren’t many comics around back then. No _Beano_ or anything. Plus, definitely no books on nineteenth century military strategy…”

“Probably not, no.”

Rimmer is quiet.

“I do miss him, still, though,” Molly says haltingly. “Every now and then. When I remember about him.”

“Every single day, then,” Rimmer says, lifting his head. “Surely. I mean, I’ve got his face.”

“Yeah, that sounds about right.”

Rimmer huffs out his breath and sinks back dejectedly into his seat. “Christ, that’s depressing. So, what—I’ll be over Lister in a couple of Cretaceous periods, except for the times when I think about him, when I won’t be.”

“Exactly.”

“Great. Is there a planet anywhere nearby where they specialise in lobotomy, d’you think?”

“I’m sure there will be somewhere, but to tell you the truth, Arnold, I’m not sure that anyone would agree to the procedure.”

“Why? What’s wrong with a bit of good old-picked ice-pick amnesia? It’s clean, it’s simple, it easily oblivionises all of my problems…”

“No, not like ethically, I mean. Just…” Molly grimaces. “Not much to dig around in there, you know.”

“Oh, smeg off.”

***

_Dear Diary,_

_1703 Days, I think – The wig is really getting on my tits, so to figuratively speak. I might just do away with it altogether, if it weren’t for the fact that I am still quite frightened of my own real hair. Yes, even three million years on._

_Don’t let this diary entry fool you into believing that nothing exciting is going on in my particular sector of deep space. Oh no, we’ve had quite an invigorating time. Just the other day, I finally managed to identify the source of the sharp little pain underneath my chin—an ingrown hair! So don’t think that being Ace is by any means a dull job._

***

An alarm is going off overhead, and Molly announces, “Incoming distress call!”

“Christ, what now?” Rimmer asks and tries to slurp at his too-hot tea in the hopes that he might actually get to drink some for once.

“Ocean planet, three clicks away,” she says, flickering slightly as she processes the incoming information. “An ore-extracting station—there’s been an explosion and there’s an oil spill now spreading faster than they can control. At this rate, the whole moon is fast becoming one big flammable bath bomb, and the crew have got no way of escaping without the whole thing going up in flames quicker than you can say _long pork barbeque._ ”

“Oh dear.” Rimmer sips his tea again. “What a terrible way to go.”

“Arnold,” Molly says warningly.

“What’s that? Ace, you say?”

Molly’s eyes narrow. “Are you seriously bargaining with people’s lives, you worthless crumb of eye-crud? I’m not calling you Ace.”

“Well, then, I’m not rescuing anyone.” Arnold stretches with a long, laborious groan. “You see, _Ace_ may have to be brave and glamorous and heroic, but as mere, useless Arnold, I am blissfully—”

_“Arnold_ , if you don’t get down there, I’m going to jettison the rest of the Jaffa cakes into space.”

Rimmer sits bolt upright. “You wouldn’t dare.”

There is the melodious chirp of a new route being input on the navicom, and Rimmer looks down to see the path to the ocean planet already tracked out—and he concedes that he may have lost this battle.

“Right, we’ll be there in about twenty minutes,” Molly says, all business and no fun, like a really rubbish mullet. “We can’t get too close because of the risk of fire, but we can land on clean water about a half mile away.”

“Land?” Rimmer echoes.

“Yes, land. That’s what it’s called when you put the plane down.”

“That’s an ocean planet,” Rimmer points out.

“Cracking observation, that. D’you phone a friend for that one, or did you come up with that all on your own?”

“It’s an ocean planet,” Rimmer repeats, louder this time, and goes on, “as in, there is nothing but ocean down there. We can’t land.”

“Sure we can. Just engage the amphibious float adaptors. Then all you’ll need to do is just hop off the side and—splash! Do your thing. You’ll just have to swim for a bit first.”

Rimmer steeples his fingers. “Yes. Well. I fear it might not be that easy, actually.”

“Why not?”

“Because…” Rimmer pauses. How to put this delicately… he clears his throat. “Because I can’t actually swim, actually,” he admits.

“You can’t swim.”

“No.”

Molly squints at him. “What do you mean you can’t swim?”

“I mean that I can’t swim.”

“How,” Molly says slowly, “can you _not swim_?”

“Right.” Rimmer purses his lips, thinking over carefully how to explain this. “So, you know how some people know how to swim?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I can’t swim.”

For a moment, Molly is silent. Then she cackles. “You’re having a laugh.”

“I assure you, I am not.”

The smile fades from Molly’s face. “Gordon Bennet. Is there anything you are good at?”

“I’m quite good at running away from things,” Rimmer says, after a moment of consideration. “Notoriously good, in fact. Boys at school used to call me Watercolours.”

“’Cause you were always running,” Molly says flatly. “Right. So when you say you can’t swim…”

“I am approximately as buoyant as the Titanic.”

“Right. But you said you’d got bronze and silver swimming—”

“Look, I also said I’d had sex with Carmen Electra,” Rimmer says sharply. “If we’re going to start nit-picking at my credentials, we’ll be here all day.”

The argue escalates but ultimately comes to several conclusions:

  1. There is no way for Rimmer to rescue these people without swimming to them,
  2. Simply abandoning these people to die a horrible death is not a viable option,
  3. Molly does not care about Rimmer’s pride or dignity, so shut the smeg up and get out there, _now_ ,



which is how Rimmer comes to be wearing two floaty armbands devised from a spare parachute and the contents of a helium canister, paddling sulkily through the water towards the nearest oil-extraction platform and trying hard not to drown.

“Absolute poppycock,” he mutters crossly, and then is almost capsized by a particularly powerful wave, and ends up swallowing a small estuary’s worth of water.

Still, the quicker he gets this over with, the quicker he can get back into _Wildfire_ and give Molly a stern talking-to. He sets his jaw. Time to be a hero.

He flails in the direction of the oil spill, and soon figures out a sort of doggy-paddle that works for him, powering towards the trapped ore-extractors at the bone-rattling pace of a swarm of krill floating helplessly into the open mouth of a whale.

Eventually, one of the extractors aboard the nearest platform crew spots him, and cries out in dismay. “Oh, God!” the man shouts. “Oh, God—help, quick, someone, get help!”

“Have no fear, for I am—” Rimmer starts, and then dips forwards head-first into the water and chokes. He manages to right himself with a great deal of thrashing, coughs seawater, and tries again. “I’m here!”

“Quick, quick,” the man calls out, his eyes round with fear. “Someone, please—a man is drowning!”

Rimmer frowns. “Where?” Then he realises. “Oh—no, I’m here to rescue _you_.”

“What?” The man matches his frown. “Are you sure?”

Grabbing hold of the ladder up to the extractor platform, Rimmer hauls himself feebly out of the oil-coated water. The man gets hold of the fur-lined collar of Rimmer’s flight-suit to help drag him upwards to safety so that Rimmer can flop down onto the floor of the platform and catch his breath, feeling very like a bedraggled otter from an environmental awareness video.

“Hi,” he says, at last, huffing and puffing as he fights for breath. “I’m… Ace Rimmer. Superhero. Here… to save the day… and be generally… amazing.”

“Hey, hey, don’t hurt yourself,” the man says kindly, trying to wipe some of the oil from Rimmer’s face, and offering him a bottle of water. “There’s no hurry. You just breathe.”

Rimmer lets his head _thunk_ back against the floor, and considers that James Bond probably never had to deal with this shit.

***

The first Lister that Rimmer actually manages to get into bed—the first _other_ Lister, that is— ironically enough is a woman. There is a part of Rimmer that wants to dance on the rooftops and use a succession of flashing lights to communicate via Morse codes across all known universes, _Arnold Rimmer is good at picking up girls, actually_ , but there is not a huge amount of time for entertaining that vindictive little daydream, because Deb is crowding him against the wall and aggressively groping him through his trousers.

She’s smaller than he’s used to, less stocky but still solid, the curve of muscle in her thighs suggestive that she would be every bit as proficient as Rimmer’s own Lister at climbing aboard and making him see stars. She is every bit as ruthless with her tongue in Rimmer’s mouth and her hands all over him, shoving at his clothes to find bare skin and biting at his lower lip when he goes to help her and takes too long fiddling with buttons.

His hands span her waist when he pulls her closer, and when she presses him hard against the metal, the swell of her tits pushes against his chest in a way that makes his brain go to static. He pushes a leg between her thighs and she rocks her hips against him in thoughtless want, and it’s just the way that Lister grinds against him ‘til his thighs sprawl and he can settle heavy and urgent in his lap.

“Come on, then,” she says, and peels her top off. Underneath, she is somewhat sour-smelling, bristling wildly at the armpits, and most importantly, not wearing a bra. He slides his hands up from her waist to palm at her tits—God, has he missed tits—and he leans in to press an open-mouthed kiss to her throat.

She is impatient, fumbling with his button and fly, and she manages to get as far as shoving a hand down the front of his trousers before he is seized by paranoia.

“Wait,” Rimmer gasps against her mouth. “Do you—have you got, er—you know. Protection, and all that?”

Lister pulls back far enough to give him a sceptical look, one eyebrow cocked. “What do I look like, Martha Stewart?”

“For wanting to do this responsibly?” Rimmer says incredulously. “For not wanting—you know what? Yes. Yes, I would like you to look like Martha Stewart.”

She rolls her eyes and makes a low, scornful noise in the back of her throat. “You’re a hologram, man. What’ve you got to worry about, anyway?”

“I admire your optimism but I’m taking no chances,” Rimmer tells her, and with the self-restraint of a monk in a brothel, he extracts her hand from his underwear. He has seen what can come of unprotected sex in one of these parallel universes, and he doesn’t plan on propagating any time soon. “I have no desire to end up impregnated.”

Now it is Lister’s turn to reel back, bewildered. “You what?” she says incredulously. “ _You_ get pregnant?”

Rimmer eyes her with suspicion. “Is it… not possible?”

“For you to get pregnant?” Lister repeats, and then reaches between them to grope him—ignoring his undignified little squeak of surprise. “With the equipment you’ve got? No.”

“Oh, thank God,” he mutters.

Lister’s eyes narrow. “Have you actually met a human woman before?”

“Honestly, I’m not entirely sure.”

With a roll of her eyes, Lister seems to at least decide that she’s come far enough to overlook Rimmer’s idiocy and shag him, anyway. She grabs him by the ears—which hurts—and drags his head down to kiss him, her mouth open and hot and tasting of stale lager.

Against her lips, Rimmer mumbles, “Bed?”

Lister makes an irritated noise in the back of her throat. “God, you are wet, aren’t you? Come on, then.” She grabs a handful of the front of Rimmer’s flight suit jacket and hauls him along to the bunk room, not slowing down when he trips over a step or stumbles over a precariously heaped pile of laundry—not even slowing down when they come crashing into the bunk room at three-hundred decibels and wake up the other Rimmer.

Arlene sits bolt upright, eyes wide and utterly disoriented. “Mummy?”

“You can stay or you can go, Rimmer, but I’m gonna be busy down here and I’m not gonna be quiet, neither,” Lister announces conversationally, still dragging Rimmer like dead-weight in the direction of the bunk.

Their progress is somewhat impeded by the fact that Rimmer crashes into a metal chair with a sound not unlike a metal scarecrow being beaten to death with a crowbar, and as he hops and swears, the lights come on.

“What the devil is going on?” Arlene demands. Her hair is squashed into an insane tangle of curls, her narrow face rumpled with sleep and pillow marks. She squints in the sudden harsh light, and then she makes eye contact with Rimmer. Her eyes widen, aghast. “Surely not.”

Rimmer makes an awkward sort of grimacing expression. “Sorry,” he says, which isn’t true, and then he is shoved into Lister’s bunk and he loses sight of Arlene as he is promptly buried in the clothes that Lister is still shucking at high-speed. He gets a sock to the face and nearly retches.

“Lister, this is completely unacceptable,” Arlene whines from above, and is ignored. “Lister. _Lister!_ ”

“If you don’t like it, take a hike for an hour,” Lister says bluntly, climbing into the bunk after him.

Rimmer very much doubts that this will take an hour, but he will enjoy these high expectations while they last.

Muttering foul obscenities under her breath, Arlene gets down from her bunk and storms angrily out. She slaps at the door panel on the way out in an ineffectual attempt to get it to slam, without success, but in truth, by that point Rimmer is no longer thinking about her at all. He has had a brain-wave, unparalleled by any scientific discovery in modern history. The Enigma Code? The invention of penicillin? Absolute balderdash—because Rimmer has remembered that the old Ace _kept a condom in the inside pocket of his jacket._

On Cloud Nine, Ten, and Eleven, Rimmer fishes the condom from his pocket—and promptly drops it. “Shit.”

“Rimmer, I’m gonna get bored and go finish meself off in a minute if you don’t hurry up.”

“I am hurrying,” Rimmer snaps, and fumbles to retrieve it, but it has disappeared somewhere in the mess of bedding and crumbs and other disgusting rubbish lying around. The back of his neck is beading with panicked sweat.

“Smegging hell—here,” Lister says, “Here,” she says, with something in her voice that might be pity if Rimmer examined it closely—which he decides not to do—and gives him the condom. “You were a half second away from wrapping up with a sachet of mayonnaise.”

“Oh,” Rimmer says. “I usually save that sort of thing for the second date.”

Then, the unthinkable: Lister laughs. She pulls him down into the mattress and straddles him. “Come on, fuck me or fuck off,” she says, and so Rimmer goes for one of those options.

Afterwards, she flops back onto her elbows with a satisfied grunt and fishes about on the bunk shelf for her half-chewed wodge of chewing gum to stick back in her mouth.

“Thanks, man,” she says brightly, and gives him a jovial punch in the shoulder which makes his bones rattle and his entire arm go numb. There is a dull ringing sensation somewhere in the vicinity of his little finger, and he feels as though he might have dislocated something. “I dunno about you,” she goes on, oblivious to the damage she has done, “but I really needed that.”

“Oh, yes,” Rimmer says. He drums his fingertips awkwardly against his sternum. “So did I.”

Lister looks over and gives a chuckle of disbelief. “Yeah?” she says. “Because, uh—I gotta say, at one point it did just look like you were hanging on for dear life.”

Rimmer flounders. “Well,” he says feebly. “Well, I—I just—I wasn’t expecting us to go quite so fast.”

“Christ, Rimmer, you are wetter than a cow in a carwash.”

He takes some offense at that. “Now, hang on,” he protests in defence of his honour. “Next time—right, next time I’ll—”

“Next time?” Lister echoes, and this time, the laugh is different—disdainful. “Steady on, man.”

This stings. Not being offered a second go by a woman whose pubes could outstretch the Bayeux tapestry is a hit to the ego, certainly. “Oh—no, I know, of course,” Rimmer says. “Of course I know. I know that.” He is blathering on again. “Yes—no. I only meant… if there ever were to be, hypothetically, of course, a time when—”

He is interrupted by a deafeningly theatrical yawn, during which Rimmer thinks he can just about glimpse Lister’s last three meals down her gullet, and then she glances pointedly at her watch.

“Getting on a bit, now,” she says. “What say we wrap this up sharpish?”

Startled again, Rimmer fumbles for a reply. “Oh—right. Yes, yes, I suppose so—”

“Grand. I’ll see you tomorrow, then,” Lister says decisively, in a tone that brooks no argument, and she drops to sprawl flat on her back. “Oh—shift up a bit, will you, Rimmer? You’re hogging the bed.”

“Oh—hang on—”

“Bit more. Yeah, bit further.”

Rimmer’s right arse-cheek is hanging off the bed. “Like this?”

“Bit further.”

“Wait, I’ll just—”

“More again. More. Just a bit more?”

Rimmer is no longer really in the bed at this point. In fact, he is crouched beside the bed like a Parisian gargoyle—still naked—and feeling very exposed. “Erm—”

“Perfect.” Lister exhales a sigh of relief. “Right—night, Rimmer.”

With that, she reaches over to slap her lamp, leaving Rimmer not just naked and alone, but now naked and alone in the dark. Within mere moments, she is snoring.

Great.

_***_

_Dear Diary,_

_1999 Days, more or less – A momentous occasion, surely. Nothing much to write home about, however. Came across an abandoned petrol station in deep space the other day. It was just sort of floating around out there, but because it’s not in orbit or anything, it was a pain in the arse to try lining up to dock…_

_Waste of time anyway. They didn’t even have any Mentos._

_***_

“Which Ace was the best looking?” Rimmer asks conversationally, and he cracks open a pistachio shell.

“D’you mind? You’re getting crap everywhere,” Molly complains.

“I am not,” Rimmer retorts, and then looks down to see that he is a bit. He sweeps the crumbs of flaking pistachio discreetly from his lap. “Why do you care anyway? I’m the one who’ll have to clean it up.”

“Yeah, but I’m the one who’ll have to spend all day looking at it while you’re off doing—I dunno—rescuing virgins and deflowering naval officers.”

Rimmer frowns. “Don’t you mean the other way round?”

Molly sniffs. “I know what I said.”

Rimmer considers whether to be insulted and kick up a fuss, but to be honest, it seems like a lot of effort for something which not even technically untrue. Instead, he opts for another pistachio and asks, “So who is it? The best-looking Ace, I mean.”

Molly pauses. “Which dimension are you again?”

“127,” Rimmer says, both surprised and touched; he preens.

“Not that one, then.”

Rimmer scowls. “God, I don’t know why I bother asking. We all know the answer anyway—your precious 001, Ace _originale_ ,” he says snippily.

“And what of it? He was a handsome bloke, you know.”

“Yes, I’m well aware, just like I’m well aware of your little obsession with him—you’re hornier than a wart-encrusted rhinoceros.”

“Oh, give it a rest,” Molly snaps. “At least Ace is actually cool. You’re dead set on someone who probably thinks hors d’oeuvres is a venereal disease.”

“Bold of you assume he knows what that is,” Rimmer shoots back.

“Well, he must be at least a little familiar, you great rancorous herpe.”

“I don’t think you can have just one singular herpe, actually.”

“You can when he’s in deep space and he’s got no mates.”

“I have got mates,” Rimmer objects. “Lots of mates—”

“Name one.”

“Lister—”

“Lister doesn’t count.”

“Why not?!” Rimmer squawks, sitting bolt upright with an undignified spray of half-masticated pistachio crumbs.

“D’you mind?” Molly asks irritably, huffing her breath in a way that ruffles her fringe. “Think I could get the news without the weather next time?”

“Why doesn’t Lister count?” Rimmer demands as he brushes the front of his flight suit clean. “He likes me—most of the time.” He hesitates. “Some of the time.” He pulls a face, considering. “Occasionally.”

“He’s not your friend, he’s in love with you.” Molly sniffs disdainfully. “If you’ve got any married friends, you know there’s a difference.”

“Well, I don’t know that,” Rimmer argues. “And more to the point, how do you? You’re a computer. You don’t have any friends. You don’t have any life at all. You spend your free time editing Wikipedia entries on Marie Curie. Your idea of a holiday is emptying your C:drive.”

“Doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy myself or looking forward to new things. There’s all sort of things I’d like to see and do and experience. Apparently, there’s a new Steps album out, for one thing.”

Rimmer snorts with a derisive roll of his eyes. “Your world is so incredibly small, isn’t it?”

“Sort of the opposite, really. Once you’ve seen one galaxy full of nothing, you’ve seen ‘em all. Just starts to feel a bit pointless.”

Bleak as it may sound, Rimmer knows the feeling. After his six-hundredth death-defying dive out of the path of a collapsing supernova, the excitement seems to lose much of its colour and sparkle. To think, he’s only been doing this for a piddly fraction of one lifetime… Molly, who is thousands of lifetimes deep, much be bored stiff.

“Go on, then,” Rimmer says, reclining in his chair. “Worst Aces, let’s hear it.”

“Worst?”

“The very worst. The cream of the crop of terribleness. The Luxembourg of Ace Rimmers, so to speak.”

“Well, 759, obviously.”

“Obviously.”

“002 was a disappointment,” Molly says. “I s’pose the bar was set quite high for him, in his defence. Still, the way he used that little old granny as a human shield—I expected better from him.”

“Was there ever a 007?”

“Oh, yeah. Useless bastard.”

Rimmer honks a laugh.

***

He plays go-between in a civil war that has raged decades in 832, trudging irritably back and forth across no-mans’-land; he helps to transmit coded messages through an intricate series of tin can string radios; he defuses a bomb using nothing more than a bobby pin and blunt pair of old nail scissors; he travels to a universe where time passes more slowly and the Greeks are still piddling about in sailboats and long frocks, and he accidentally spoils the big twist of _Oedipus Rex_ ; he misses Lister. He is revered as a deity and shunned as an ill omen and, in one reality, mistaken for a pop star.

After much introspection and a nasty dandruff rash, Rimmer makes the decision to ditch the wig. His hairline is making a bit of an escape, he notices, but nothing drastic—if anything, half the time, he feels he could do with less hair—and he besides, he reckons he looks quite dignified.

In 909, he catches a virus and has to go offline for a few days while he has various anti-malware scans run of his lightbee, and he wakes up later refreshed, slightly disoriented, and German. _Das ist doch lächerlich,_ he complains while the director of Psamanthe’s Royal Air Force tries to track down an electrical engineer. _Hast du überhaupt eine Ahnung von den Konsequenzen, wenn ein Space Corp umgewandelt wird?_

Could be worse, though, he supposes. He could be French.

He drives the getaway ship for a heist to restore priceless jewels to their ancestral owners; he defeats a giant death-worm hellbent on snaffling up the Crown Prince of Galatea on a school trip to see the rings; he misses Lister; he wonders if his experience as Ace counts as a gap-year if it goes on for the rest of his life; he finds another universe in which the other Rimmer is a woman, and even more repugnant than the last female incarnation; he misses Lister awfully. He gambles the future of an entire planet on a game of Whist, which he doesn’t know how to play, and wins by accident. He sleeps with another Lister, more successfully than last time, and then another; it becomes a habit. He feels sort of hollow and sick afterwards, every time. He accidentally gets an alternate Rimmer killed, and doesn’t feel as guilty about it as he thinks he probably should.

Rimmer can’t help feeling as though the ache of missing Lister should diminish over time. He should be getting over it, really, as though loving Lister is the flu and he’s just rebooting his immune system. Instead, here he is a million miles and a thousand universes away, and he badly wants to go home.

***

They’re never quite the same.

One calls Rimmer _baby_ , which he’s not sure how he feels about; another curls a finger inside him and brings tears to his eyes with his teeth at Rimmer’s throat. There is the Lister who keeps silent the whole way through, arching into each thrust with no more than a grunt or a gasp; there is another who talks nonstop, and not in the sexy way his own Lister does it, but in a sort of meaningless complimentary blabber about how sexy Rimmer is, in increasingly profane terms that make him feel a bit uncomfortable. In Dimension 386, Lister wants to come on Rimmer’s face; in 942, he’s adamant about the missionary with two condoms and the lights turned off. Once, one of them even marvelled at how good Rimmer is in bed, and he doesn’t have the heart to admit that he’s had dozens of different Listers worth of practice.

Rimmer knows he’s chasing an echo, but a series of Lister-shaped one night stands briefly blunts the edge of knowing that he’s never going home—and it passes the time.

In some dimensions, he can’t get up the enthusiasm—figuratively _and_ literally—for another disappointing roll in the hay with yet another Lister who is almost perfect but no cigar, and he branches out a bit. Women, mostly. They’re easier to seduce, since two-thirds of realities still see heterosexuality as the default, so he doesn’t need to wrangle the delicate queries as to which team they bat for, and also because he’s discovered that when he’s Ace, if he more or less keeps his mouth shut, a lot of girls are into the ‘strong, silent type’.

He turns Molly off and shimmies awkwardly along to his sleeping compartment, or else finds a quiet room, an unlocked office, and on one occasion, the interrogation room of a military police station.

_This is much better,_ Rimmer usually reflects at some point in the proceedings. _No emotional attachment, no fixation on people you’re never going to see again—just pure, meaningless pleasure. Wallop._

It’s normally around then that things start to go wrong for him. Unbidden, Lister’s voice will come into his head, rough and raspy and desperate like it was in the years when Rimmer was soft-light, telling him what he’d do to him if he could only get his hands on him, or urging him on and goading him— _more, more, come on, big man, like you mean it_. Then, inevitably, Rimmer gets too caught up in it— _like that, fuck—fuck, Rimmer, yeah_ —and his skin flushes too hot and his hands go shaky on someone else’s skin— _come on, darlin’_ —and he finishes, whether he means to or not.

The high is only momentary. The mingled shame, embarrassment, and crushing disappointment that follows is enormous.

Then he apologises. He makes a go of finishing things off. On one truly humiliating occasion, when he’d had a hard day and been tired and homesick and missing his own universe awfully, he starts to cry, and has to hurriedly cobble together some story about a dead aunt before he utterly obliterates the reputation of Ace as a tough, macho Casanova-type.

Those days, Rimmer wishes he were the kind of man to prop himself up at a bar and drink himself silly; instead, he crawls back to _Wildfire_ to eat three packets of Jaffa cakes and read about the rise of the Third Reich. Molly has less tact than sense, but even she knows to keep schtum. Anyway, Rimmer doesn’t need her to bring him back down to earth—he’s already painfully aware of how pathetic this is.

He eats another Jaffa cake. He programs the next jump. He tries to put the past behind him.

***


	5. Chapter 5

**CHAPTER FIVE**

The novelty wears off. The luxuries which began as an unparalleled delight become gradually, depressingly tiresome. The oysters and caviar give him stomach ache; vintage champagne hangovers feel somehow worse than any other; conversation always seems to revolve around art and politics, and Rimmer is tired of pretending to have opinions on Neptunian oligarchs. No-one ever seems to know the football results—not that Rimmer cares about zero-G, really, but he’s so starved for a normal conversation that he’s thinking of converting. To really wind up Lister up, he’s thinking of buying himself the Man United strip.

He dines with princes, drinks with the Admiralty, and schmoozes with a hologrammatic reincarnation of Audrey Hepburn who tells him that he’s quite dashing if you’ve had a few drinks. He’s a celebrity, out of nowhere, and it’s a helium tank to his ego, but it seems undeserved.

It’s hard to find enthusiasm for anything, after years and years of the same old schtick. He sort of understands, now, why the original Ace always seemed so unenthused in recounting stories of dramatic, hair-rising acts of heroism—after a while, they all seem to blend together. If you’ve saved one universe, you’ve saved them all.

In this universe, Rimmer wears glasses; in that universe, the solar system orbits the moon instead of the sun, making it a lunar system, technically, and everything else is much the same except that the inhabitants of Earth are, on the whole, pale and calcium-starved. In another universe, Rimmer made Head Boy in his last year at Io House, grew immensely in confidence, and left Jupiter for university on another planet, rather than following in his father’s footsteps, resulting in a life in graphic design and sleeping with slim, solemn-looking young men. He gets married, or he dies alone, and he becomes an officer, or he doesn’t, and it all just… sort of blurs together.

There are consistencies, of course, across universes. His hair is always uncontrollable in whatever style he attempts; he is always rubbish at maths, even in the realities where he brute-forced his way through dyscalculia to an excellent career on the other side; he is always, at the very least, a little bit of a twat.

In his own reality, Rimmer had always resented being called a smeghead. Now that he is on the outside looking in, however, he understands that unfortunately sometimes no other word will do.

Many of them insinuate that he’s gay—in fairness to them, the flight suit is a bit much—and almost of all of them call him a smug, smarmy, arrogant git when all Rimmer is trying to do is help _. As much use as a chocolate teapot_ , one says scornfully, while Rimmer is doing his best with the controls as _Starbug_ hurtles towards an imploding star. _Like the wet dream of a pre-pubescent baton twirler_ , another sneers, and it takes everything for Rimmer not to snap and point out that he would only know that because _you did baton twirling at school, you self-righteous vomit stain_.

He watches them writhing with envy and self-loathing, so insecure that they reek of it, and he tries his best to be patient with them; he knows they have so much further still to go.

There are so many different iterations of who he could’ve been. What would have happened if he’d been put into stasis when he shoved a pencil up Hollister’s nose? What if he had pushed not to stop at the _Nova 5_? What if Yvonne McGruder had really liked him? What if he’d been any good at his job, and sealed the drive plate properly? What if he’d kissed Lister the first time he wanted to, and not spent all that time roiling angrily with it?

Worst of all are the universes where he made it— _up, up, up the ziggurat_ , to pips and privilege and an ensuite bathroom—and finds himself no happier for it.

First Lieutenant Rimmer is retired after a stress-induced psychotic break; Navigation Officer Rimmer is hated by all his colleagues and still eats lunch alone; Communications Officer Rimmer is in a loveless marriage with a woman named Brunhilde, who is somehow even less lovely than the image conjured up by the name, and twice as tedious. There is a reality where he is an officer, and he and Lister don’t speak. He’s too good for him. Lister is beneath him. The two of them survived stasis, the last human beings in the galaxy, and they live entirely separate lives onboard this ship of the city. Their paths never cross and First Officer Rimmer is utterly miserable.

All that these glimpses serve to do is reinforce Rimmer’s increasingly certainty that he actually had it quite good in his own universe. Good old 127—of course, he was a dead soup machine technician, but at least he’s sane-ish (anxiety disorders and obsessive compulsive tendencies don’t count) and somewhat sexually active and, most importantly, not married to smegging Brunhilde.

Sometimes he asks Molly if they can steer clear of alternate Rimmers for a bit, when it all gets a bit too depressing, or when a Rimmer has been particularly unkind to him, but apparently ‘ _the multiverse isn’t a Quality Street tin, Arnold, give over_ ’—so the never ending parade of smegheads is something simply to be endured, like having a cavity drilled, or being cornered by a busker in the street.

Another day, another smeghead. Shit.

*******

_Dear Diary,_

_2414 Days, or something like that – My mother used to say that if I couldn’t think of anything nice to say, then think harder, you useless git. But then again, my mother also said that if I couldn’t get into the Space Corps, I may as well sell meth, so stuff that_

_I am so smegging sick of Molly, that half-witted—in fact, no, she doesn’t even qualify as a half-wit. She’s a quarter-wit. An eighth-wit. I am so tired of her picking at me every time I want to eat a boiled egg. I am so tired of her acting as though there is something inherently suspicious about having specific left foot socks and right foot socks. I am SO TIRED of being made to feel a fool of just because I don’t know who the Beatles are. What am I, an insect scientist? Why should I care?!_

*******

The newly devised rule is this: Rimmer is allowed to devote himself to missing one thing per day and one thing only. It’s too much, too ridiculously over-indulgent, to miss Lister all day, every day, so he ekes out his stupid, pathetic, homesick yearning for as long as he can, like a builder with only one teabag left. One day it’s the curve of his thighs, the next the dimple in his stupid chin. He has held out so far on missing his filthy laugh, knows he’ll need to save it for the rainiest of days. He parcels his memory of Lister out into narrow slivers: the apples of his cheeks, the dark warmth of his eyes, the acrid pong of his socks.

On bad days, he imagines kissing him; on worse days, in his head, they play board games and Lister lets him be the little hat. He throws doubles. He wins, and Lister calls him a cheating scumbag, in a touch of perhaps excessive realism, and throws the Monopoly money at him. Lister grins at him over Mayfair.

Then he blinks and is catapulted again into chaos and violence, into navigating a ship with no functional engines through a field of flying debris, into death-defying leaps and improbable stunts of heroism, to Molly berating him for various degrees of ineptitude and calling him a wet bag of chicken nuggets. Codes to crack, bombs to defuse, maidens to rescue and then reluctantly deflower. Rimmer jumps between universes and slips further and further away from his own life. He tries to keep track of the passage of time, but the days and months get muddied together like the layers of a badly executed trifle. He is not as reliable at filling in his journal as he’d like to be, and even Molly gets a tad mixed up as to what year it is.

“I mean, I get a notification when it’s my birthday,” Molly says nonchalantly, when Rimmer brings up the issue, “or when someone you went to school with has a baby—but other than that, it’s anybody’s guess.”

Rimmer huffs. “Well, how many of those have there been?” he asks.

“Erm, six since we skipped through that wormhole, and before that, none for ages.”

“Thank you,” Rimmer says. “You’re about as much use as an inside voice on an opera singer.”

“I do try,” Molly replies mildly, and returns to navigating him round the asteroid roundabout, while Rimmer tries to keep moving ever forwards.

***

“Christ, here we go again,” Molly says, in the long-suffering tones of a parent hearing a mysterious thump in the next room, as they turn on _Wildfire’s_ indicators to pull into _Red Dwarf_ ’s hangar. “Just out of interest, is it a Porsche today, or the old bicycle again?”

“Smeg off,” Rimmer tells her.

“Ah, right. Well, enjoy the Tour de France, then.”

Rimmer ignores this and steers them down into the bay. All jokes aside, he does genuinely still feel a flutter of nerves every time he touches down on board this stupid ship, and he takes a moment to check his appearance in the rearview mirror. He smooths over his hair, trying to make it something approaching respectable. He takes a deep breath and pops open the cockpit door—and then blinks in surprise at the figure he sees standing by the ship, holding a clipboard like it’s a hostage trying to escape.

“Oh, dear,” Rimmer says.

“Oh, dear, indeed!” replies the other Rimmer, and starts imperiously scribbling. “Right—I hope you’ve got a mighty good explanation for this, miladdo.”

Christ, Rimmer is too tired to deal with this.

“Look, there’s an easy explanation for this—”

Before Rimmer can get a word out, however, the other Rimmer squints at him in suspicion. “Ace, eh?” he snaps. “Well, well, well…” He turns his sheet of paper over to carry on scribbling the back of what looks to Rimmer like the most useless form he’s ever seen, including the teaspoon rental forms he designed himself once, designed to keep Lister from hoarding all the cutlery in his bunk. “First and foremost, I’d like to know what exactly you think you’re doing here,” the other Rimmer says without looking up from his clipboard. “Not content with loafing about in your own universe, were you? Thought you’d come and loaf about in ours?”

“Wait—you know who I am?” Rimmer says.

The other Rimmer eyes him over the top of the clipboard. “I’ll ask the questions if you don’t mind,” he says coolly. “But—yes, of course I know who you are. You’re hard to miss.” This comment is paired with a disdainful flick of his eyes over Rimmer’s outfit. “I’ll tell you this for free—your spangles and latex get up didn’t impress me then, and it doesn’t impress me now, _Ace_ ,” he goes on, and he says the name—title?—like an insult.

Even though Rimmer isn’t really Ace and has no idea of anything about the iteration that has been here previously, he still balks at that.

“Look, I’m just here to solve whatever issue you lot are dealing with, and then I’ll be out of your stupid curly hair,” Rimmer says curtly. “So what’s the problem?”

“Problem?”

“Yes, problem,” Rimmer repeats. “That’s what it’s called when something goes horribly wrong and you don’t know how to fix it.”

The other Rimmer sniffs. “Well, if you say so,” he says airily. “I can’t say I have a huge amount of experience with—having problems, as it were.”

“Your entire life is one big problem,” Rimmer tells him, and enjoys watching his alternate self flush a blotchy, angry red.

“Well, I hate to be the bearer of good news, but there is no problem here,” the other Rimmer sneers. “Everything is working just fine. The tickety-boo-est it’s ever been, I’d wager. Absolute tip-top condition,” he says, and then the ship crashes.

At least, that what’s Rimmer assumes just happened.

There is an almighty bang, and the whole ship jolts so that Wildfire teeters precariously on two landing struts before clonking back down, sparks hiss from the overheard lights, and Rimmer falls on his arse. The only redeeming factor is that the other Rimmer also falls over, and he cocks up his stupid form.

“Righto,” Rimmer says, climbing gingerly back to his feet. “For argument’s sake, shall I stick around a bit longer, just in case?”

They march up to the drive room pronto, where the ugliest android Rimmer has ever seen is wrestling with a skutter holding a knife, an Afro-sporting Cat in a velour tracksuit is repeatedly slapping the drive controls with a towel, and Lister is wielding a fire extinguisher upside down.

“I leave you alone for ten smegging minutes…” the other Rimmer exclaims and is ignored.

“Evening chaps,” Rimmer cuts in, pitching his voice as deep and charismatic and downright pally as it can go, and he swaggers handsomely into action. “You look to be in a bit of a Branston—let me help out.”

Lister looks up, bewildered. His hair is cropped short and he wears a red polo shirt. He takes in Rimmer properly, looks between him and his duplicate, eyes widening. “What the—”

Against his better judgement, Rimmer feels something of the façade slip. “Hi,” he says, more diffident than intended, and manages to hold Lister’s eyes but only just. “Long story—same Rimmer, different universes. I’m Ace.”

“Davey,” Lister says with a nod, and Rimmer tries to conceal his revulsion— _Davey_?!—without great success. “Fair enough. D’you mind giving us a hand?”

“I’d love to,” Rimmer lies, and rolls his sleeves up.

Lister—Davey, that is—nods to the others. “This is Krystyn, that’s Mr. Whiskers, and this is a service robot trying to take over the ship. Muck in wherever you like, really.”

“That’s my cue,” the other Rimmer says, and retreats to the far side of the room to watch from a safe distance—smegging coward—although he does step out to call airily, “Oh, but Davey? Do try not to let anyone impregnate you this time.”

Rimmer’s head snaps up, but there’s no time to dwell on that because—to reiterate—the skutter has a knife, and the drive room is on fire.

It takes three of them to safely disarm Nightmare Wall-E—the Cat, who Rimmer will _not_ be referring to at any point as Mr. smegging Whiskers, mainly just shouts from a safe distance about all the ways they’re doing it wrong. They come out in one piece, more or less, although Lister does get a nasty cut across his palm in the process. Then once the skutter is indisposed, it is easy to put out the other remaining fire, literal _and_ figurative, especially once Krystyn has rebooted the ship’s computer, Lolly.

Slowly, the flashing and the sirens and the warning blips fade out into a fuzzy sort of static, and Lister sinks to sit in a heap on the floor, clutching his bloody hand to his chest.

“How on Titan did this even happen?” Rimmer asks.

“That skutter’s been gradually going bananas for weeks now,” the other Rimmer says irritably, giving the unconscious robot a kick. “Banging on about JMC synthetic discrimination laws and worker’s rights and all that tosh. Only _someone—_ ” and here he flicks a pointed look at Lister—“kept egging him on and getting him riled up towards rebellion… and then, of course, is surprised when he gets stabbed.”

“How was I supposed to know that when they said, _death to all humans_ , that included us?” Lister—that is, Davey, smegging hell—exclaims.

“True, you do barely qualify,” the other Rimmer mutters, and Davey shoots him a withering look.

Rimmer takes a deep breath and crosses to Davey, still nursing his injury. “Let’s have a look,” Rimmer says, trying to be brave and chivalrous, and immediately regrets it as he takes one look at the blood-shiny, purple, sort of… _flap_ of skin, and feels very unwell indeed. “Oh dear.”

He steadies himself with a hand against the nearby wall, only to discover that the nearby wall is not quite as nearby as he had thought, and he topples into the navigation table. He knocks a map, half a sixpack of lager, and part of a jigsaw puzzle flying, and then lands in a heap on the floor.

“You alright?” Davey asks kindly.

“Just peachy, thank you,” Rimmer says feebly.

While Krystyn hauls Rimmer up from the ground, Davey sets about trying to repair his own hand with a staple gun and a Pritt stick. Rimmer determinedly avoids looking and instead focuses on taking deep, steadying breaths until the room stops spinning wildly. The other Rimmer straightens one chair and then tries to look busy; Mr. Whiskers pulls out a lint roller and starts clearing dust from his velvet lapels.

“I’m going to get a mop,” the other Rimmer says, casting a critical eye over the drive room. “Or at least a skutter without a criminal record.” With that, he swans off to be a prick somewhere else, or maybe just to avoid doing anything real smegging work.

Rimmer lifts his head and watches his alternate self walk out purposefully. For a while, he stays bent double, his hands braced on his knees, while he breathes through the remaining nausea. Only when he’s a million percent sure that Davey’s hand has been cobbled roughly back together by Krystyn does he look across.

“So, erm,” he starts delicately, clearing his throat, “what exactly did Rimmer mean—when he said, er, to try not to get … impregnated? This time?”

Davey groans. “Smeg. You heard that?”

Rimmer cocks his eyebrows. “Hard to miss.”

Davey drops his head into his chest with a long, drawn out sigh of dismay. “Smegging hell. Look—it’s… it’s a long story, alright?” he mutters. “There was this other universe, this other Rimmer and Davey, except they were women, and—well. I gave birth to a boy.”

Rimmer makes a face. “It’s a more common predicament than you might think,” he says sympathetically.

“Well, there you have it. You get knocked up by your bunkmate’s female body-double one time and you never hear the smegging end of it.”

Rimmer recoils. “Wait, what? Arlene?!” he says incredulously. “You made love to _Arlene_?!”

Davey’s eyebrows lift. “I mean, making love is a strong term for it,” he says. “I don’t think she even properly got her knickers off.”

It boggles the mind. In this universe, he is, technically speaking, the father—mother?—of Lister’s children. Good God.

“But don’t worry,” Davey says, and lifts his hands up as though in surrender. “I’m not planning to make a habit of it.”

Obediently, Rimmer gives a polite little laugh, as though he is not in truth quite disappointed by this news. For want of something to do with his hands, he sort of awkwardly dusts himself off and looks around the drive room, which is admittedly a wreck, but that’s not his concern—he’s a superhero, not housekeeping. The android can deal with this lot. Rimmer’s bit is more or less done.

Actually, yes—Rimmer is done.

He pulls a face.

All told, it’s a much more straightforward adventure than Rimmer has been accustomed to. No-one actively trying to kill him, for one thing; for another, the only real danger seems to have been more or less sorted in—Rimmer checks his watch—under ten minutes. Normally, by this time, he would have only just figured out what’s wrong, let alone actually having fixed the problem.

“You got somewhere to be?” Davey asks.

“Oh—no, sorry, I was just—”

Davey laughs, looping a length of cable round and round his hand to tidy it away. “Relax, man, I’m just winding you up.”

“It’s just—well, usually the point where things aren’t on fire anymore is, erm, that’s often when I head out.”

Davey looks up, seeming put out, if Rimmer’s not imagining it. “Oh, ey?” he says. “You only just got here. You haven’t so much as had a cuppa tea.”

Rimmer hesitates. “A brew does sound tempting,” he admits.

“Go on,” Davey says, slapping him soundly on the shoulder. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you look like smeg.”

As Rimmer balks at this, Davey gently pushes at his arm. “You know what I mean. I’m only saying—you look like you could do with a break. Somewhere to get your head down.”

Rimmer arches his eyebrows. “You sure you’re not trying to pick me up?”

Davey laughs again. “Steady on. Sorry, I don’t play for that team.”

“Unusual,” Rimmer says, then, seeing Davey’s frown, he clarifies, “I just mean—lots of dimensions. Lots of Listers.” He shrugs helplessly. “You know.”

“No kidding,” Davey says with a low whistle. “Come on, then, hot stuff. Let’s get you a drink. I could kill for some lunch, too.”

On the far side of the drive room, Mr. Whiskers’ head snaps up. “Lunch?”

Some things never change, it seems.

The three of them head down together towards G-deck and a bar entitled, not Parrots, but Toucans; en route, Davey stops to punch an order into a nearby vending machine—two bags of crisps, a bowl full of plain, unflavoured tuna, a sausage and beans sandwich, a cup of tea and a pork pie for Rimmer.

When they reach the bar, Davey dumps their lunch on the table and immediately sets to work quartering the bags of crisps for the table. “You’re a lot quieter than our Rimmer,” he comments offhandedly as he goes for his sandwich.

“Less of a jerk, too,” Mr. Whiskers adds, grabbing tuna by the handful and shovelling it into his mouth like he’s feeding a wild horse. “Though that ain’t much of an achievement. Jack the Ripper had better people skills than that guy. He’s jerkier than a jar of dried beef strips.”

“He’d be slagging me off nonstop,” Davey says, and then nods at Rimmer. “And you. So what’s the difference between you and him?”

“Not sure. One tiny choice made differently at some point in our lives that lead to two completely unique path. I took history at school; perhaps he read geography.” Rimmer shrugs. “Maybe it’s an even stranger difference, like in his universe, Adam Sandler is funny.”

Davey snorts.

This is surreal—to be dissecting the life and character of another Arnold Judas Rimmer, to nit-pick and criticise and make snidey comments the way that other people, for most of his life, have talked about him. All at once it smacks weirdly of disloyalty and also feels deeply invigorating.

“Could be worse,” Mr. Whiskers says cheerily with a shit-eating grin. “He could be the father of your child.”

“Oh, alright, leave it out,” Davey groans, swatting aimlessly at him.

Rimmer shakes his head and goes again for his cup of tea. “I still can’t believe it.”

“Why not?” Davey asks, and he props an elbow on the table, tilts on it to study Rimmer more closely, and gives a half-laugh. “Smeg, you’re really hung up on this, aren’t you?”

Rimmer shakes his head so vigorously that he might strain something. “No, no, no—no, I’m not—I’m not obsessed with the idea or anything, it’s just—very strange for me to think about.”

“What, did you and your Lister not get on, like?”

“Not exactly.” Rimmer falters. “Erm. We were, er—I was—together. With him. Or I was, a while ago.” It makes Rimmer’s ears burn just admitting it, especially to the guy wearing his face and his DNA and his hat.

“Ah.” Davey gives a knowing, indulgent nod. “I read you.”

“It’s not—I don’t mean that we—it isn’t as though I’m—you know,” Rimmer flounders. “I was just saying it—it makes me—er—”

Davey holds both hands up as though in surrender. “Hey, say no more.” He turns back to his pint, sips at it, and is quiet for a long moment before he shoots Rimmer a sly, smiling look. “You wanna see him?”

“Who?” Rimmer says absently, and then looks over and understands. “What—no! The baby?” He jerks to his feet in instinctive panic. “It’s not here, is it?” he checks, his voice shooting high as he searches for anywhere a baby could feasibly be stashed. Under the bar? In one of the cupboards? In the sink? No, don’t be ridiculous—you wouldn’t be able to wash your hands…

“Smeg, no—relax.” Davey pats the pockets of his leather jacket. “I’ve got a picture, hang on.”

Rimmer breathes. He relaxes—but only marginally. He is about to politely decline, but then he hesitates. He has to confess… he’s curious. He clears his throat for a moment of delay, not wanting to seem overly keen. “Erm. Go on, then.”

In Davey’s wallet, there is a creased Polaroid, the colours washed out. He pulls the picture out for Rimmer to take, and for a moment, Rimmer only eyes it like Davey is offering him the vector of cholera—and then he takes it.

The child in the photo is about two or three years old. A boy. Fat and apple-cheeked and curly-haired, biracial, with Lister’s dark eyes and wide smile and a pair of bucket ears that are tragically, unmistakeably, one hundred percent Rimmer’s DNA.

Rimmer doesn’t know what to say. He isn’t really comfortable with children. Of course, he’s always liked the idea of having his own someday, but more as a sort of status symbol than out of any great desire to babyproof all his furniture. Faced now, however, with the irrefutable evidence of a dip in the Rimmer-Lister gene pool, he is finding a very strange hybrid of emotion elicited in him.

Gradually, Rimmer becomes aware that he is just looking blankly at the photo, saying nothing, so he fumbles for a remark. “That’s a child,” he says stupidly, and then regrets it.

“I mean,” Davey says dubiously, frowning as he takes the photo back. “Yeah.”

“Hey, he’s doing better than I did,” Mr. Whiskers declares. “First time I saw that thing, I thought it was the return of Nightmare Chucky.”

Davey rolls his eyes. “Cheers, guy.”

Rimmer rubs at the back of his head, feeling awkward. “So do you ever—do you see him often?”

“Not as much as I want to,” Davey says. “I mean, he’s effectively Deb and Arlene’s kid, so. Plus, their universe is less of a cock-up than ours—odds are he might even be well-adjusted by the end of it.”

“He’s being raised by us, and you think he’s going to be well-adjusted?” The idea is ludicrous.

Davey shrugs. “The crew are alive on their ship. They’ve got support and people who can help them. Friends, family. They’re not constantly at risk of dying in a space accident.”

“Provided no drive plates rupture any time soon.”

“Well. I did mention that to them, and I think they’ve fixed it up—or at least put some better safeguards in place if anything ever does go wrong,” Davey says. “They better have done, anyway. I’m not having my Bexley incinerated like the rest of them.”

Against all odds, Rimmer finds that strangely sweet—that same old defensive instinct of Lister’s. That’s not to say that he’s envious or broody or anything like that. Of course he has always known Lister, in every dimension, to be loyal to a fault, protector of those that should really learn to toughen up under their own steam.

“I had always thought that if I ever had a son, I would call him Thomas,” Rimmer says, before he can think about what he’s saying or why he’s saying it. He’s not _wistful_ , he’s just sort of thinking out loud. “Old family name. My great-grandfather’s, for example. Named for history’s greatest cynic, he was always a staunch supporter of critical thinking and free speech. He was one of the most brilliant and forward-thinking men of his generation, with advanced philosophical notions about the universe that others were just too… too small-minded to understand. For one thing, he uncovered a major conspiracy—huge—where he discovered that the Queen had been replaced by an identical copy and no-one had noticed. Or there was the time he tried to take over a research base to force them to confess that the Earth was flat.”

Davey’s eyebrows lift. “What, was this before space travel?”

“Oh, no, he was on Io at the time,” Rimmer says. “I think he thought that the Earth was a flat circle, to be fair. Like a holepunch.”

Mr. Whiskers frowns. “But… the Earth _is_ flat.”

Davey sighs. “We’ve been over this, Whiskers. That’s just a map.”

Sitting back in his chair, Mr. Whiskers seems to consider this. “Huh. Is that why there’s that extra pointy continent in the top corner?”

Rimmer frowns. “Do you… do you mean the compass?”

“How am I supposed to know?” Mr. Whiskers asks. “I’ve never been there.”

Davey plants his head in his hands. Between his fingers, he peeks at Rimmer. “Sounds like Whiskers and your grandpa would get on great.”

“Alright, alright,” Rimmer says, with a roll of his eyes. “So my great-grandfather was wrong about some things. Perhaps it’s not a legacy to be hugely proud of, but I think there’s much to be said for a healthy dose of scepticism—and anyway, I still always thought that Thomas Rimmer would be a good, strong name for a boy.”

Davey lifts his head, and Rimmer looks over to find, surreally, that Davey is smiling at him. The curve of his mouth is soft with a sort of fond exasperation, and Davey says, “Yeah, I know.” He turns the photo around and shows Rimmer the back. “Arlene thought so, too.”

On the back of the photograph is Davey’s messy scrawl: _Bexley Thomas Lister, 2 yr 3 m._

Rimmer thinks he might be having heartburn.

Davey goes to tuck the photograph away. “Cute kid, though, right?” he says, fondness warm in his voice.

“I suppose so,” Rimmer says, and doesn’t realise that he’s staring until Davey looks around and catches him. Rimmer defaults instinctively to a frown and looks at his cup of tea, trying his hardest not to think about his own Lister a thousand realities away. He fails. After a beat, he says, “My Lister—I mean—my—David, the one from my—my one—” Rimmer fumbles uselessly. “He—he wanted to keep his. Did you—”

“Yeah, I did. I wish I got to see him more but, you know. Dimension hopping’s never easy.”

“Tell me about it,” Rimmer mutters.

“I never even thought I wanted a kid,” Davey admits. “Too many ways to screw ‘em up. Well—out of my hands now.”

“Face it, anything is better than being raised by you,” Mr. Whiskers says. “You think the recommended five-a-day is about bowel movements.”

Rimmer recoils.

“Well, what else am I doing five times a day?” Davey asks, perplexed, and Rimmer declines to comment.

He returns to _Wildfire_ the following morning, after a much-needed night of relaxation, of being allowed to sleep over in a spare room down the hall, of reading by lamplight in a bed big enough to actually stretch out in—bliss.

When he says his goodbyes and climbs back into the cockpit, however, he regrets it; the first question he’s faced with, predictably, is, “So how was the Tour de France?” and Molly ignores all his protestations that nothing happened at all.

For a while, Rimmer lets her blather on aimlessly without interruption—it’s only kindness, really, when the rest of her life is a meaningless, empty, derelict blur of a thousand eons of babysitting—and when there is a lull as she pauses to take breath, Rimmer says, “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

Molly clicks her tongue impatiently. “Cor, can’t you take a joke, Arnold?”

“No—not this—but this, _this—_ ” He gestures round him at the cockpit. “Being Ace. I’m tired of it.”

“Oh, give it a rest, you’re not exactly hard done by, are you?” Molly pouts, her expression completely devoid of sympathy. “Are all the medals and accolades weighing heavy on you? Is being Buzz Lightyear with teeth really starting to get you down?”

“I mean it, Molly. I’ve thought it through, and—”

“No, you haven’t. You’ve just sort of thought round the edges, like a maniac eating a Twix,” Molly tells him. “You don’t get to just _quit_ , remember? This isn’t week three of Weight Watchers. Like it or not, you’re in this for the long haul.”

“This isn’t long haul,” Rimmer says. “Tokyo to Buenos Aires, that’s long haul. The Eurotunnel on a Bank Holiday weekend is long haul—but this? This is a nightmare. The choice between an eternity of being a spangled tosspot doing what is, essentially, glorified sofa-surfing, or oblivion. That’s not a choice, that’s Purgatory.”

Molly lets a slow breath out through her nose. She regards him calmly, evenly, with the expression of an infants’ schoolteacher waiting out a tantrum. “Go to bed,” she says at last. “You’ll feel better in the morning.”

“What morning?” Rimmer says sourly. “The passage of time has no meaning anymore.”

With a soft _bleep_ , Molly disappears, replaced instead by the words AUTOPILOT ENGAGED in white block letters across the screen, and Rimmer sits back heavily in his seat.

He would’ve liked an argument, he thinks. At least then he would know that the topic was at open for negotiation. This, though, is clear as anything—end of discussion. He scratches absently at his jaw. He doesn’t go to bed, but stares through the windshield at the empty dark, feeling scraped thin and hollow.

***

_Dear Diary,_

_2803 Days, I think – Run out of Custard Creams. Things starting to look quite bleak. Curly Wurly in the side pocket seems increasingly tempting._

_Still miss Lister._

*******

As soon as they touch down, it’s not looking good. The moon has a breathable atmosphere, but is shrouded with thick, greenish fog, only illuminated by sparse floodlights set out at staggered intervals, and the distant glow of the research station—one at each pole. True, Rimmer can only see one of them, along with a few of the observation outposts scattered here and there, but if the south polar station is anywhere near as rough as the north is, it’s looking stickier than a toddler’s high-five.

“Can you do a scan of the moon’s surface?” Rimmer asks as he pulls on his gloves, peering fearfully out of the canopy side.

“Several life forms registering,” Molly reads out, her voice coming smoothly over the scan’s intermittent beeping. “Looks like most of the scientists are trapped in those observation pods over the ridge.”

Rimmer nods. “And the rest of the moon?”

“Crawling.”

“Goody.”

Rimmer grabs his gun—a sort of pistol-adjacent mini bazookoid thing that he always holds very gingerly in case he accidentally shoots himself—and heads out.

Outside, it is cold and damp in a way that reminds Rimmer of school camping trips to Centreparcs, but he moves briskly. He keeps his wits about him at all times, ready to fight at a moment’s notice, hyperaware of his surroundings, just daring something horrible to try and catch him by surprise, just try and sneak up on him—and then he trips over a low crag and goes flying.

“Smeg!” he hisses, scrambling to right himself, and fervently hopes no-one saw that. Then again, he reasons as he limps on towards the first observation pod, this is an inhospitable, maniac-addled moon, and so the chances of that one tiny blunder having been witnessed is as resoundingly miniscule as the likelihood of Lister taking a bubble bath, or Wolves winning the Premier League.

He knocks at the metal door to the observation pod and is let in by a broad-shouldered, gentle-faced man who whose name tag on his biosuit declares him to be Dr. Vicente, and who opens the conversation with, “You alright? We all saw you stack it on the way over.”

Rimmer scowls.

He elbows his way inside, gets himself into the centre of the room—where he will seem most heroic—and dramatically braces his hands on his hips. “Ace Rimmer, intergalactic superhero, here to save the day,” he declares. “I see that you’re trapped in here. How can I help?”

Vicente explains: how their radio and comms systems have been cut off from the other pods and from the research station; how the fuel lines on their rovers have been severed; how no-one is coming to rescue them; how they need to get back to the research station but face a treacherous journey back. It’ll be tricky, but not impossible… they just need someone dashing and amazing to help lead the way.

“Alright, here’s the plan,” Rimmer says in his very Ace-iest voice. “You head for the station while I cover you. Small groups, or I can’t keep track of you all. Until I get back, keep this door shut and don’t open for anyone but me—the password will be Mussolini.”

Vicente frowns. “Why?”

“This isn’t the time for silly questions,” Rimmer snaps. “Do you want me to save your bacon or not?”

“Yes, please,” Vicente concedes in a low mutter.

“Righto. Group one, I want you on me like jam on toast. Stay close to me and keep your eyes peeled. Scratch that—keep them shredded and fried. Keep your eyes delicately sauteed in a balsamic glaze.”

Rimmer can’t remember whether he’s had lunch.

Vicente and one of his assistants exchange an uncertain look, but they shoulder their gear and get ready to move.

“Let’s go!”

The moon’s surface atmosphere is thin but breathable, the gravity lesser than they’re used to, and so they stumble, unusually light-footed across the loose, powdery rock underfoot, like someone’s upended Rimmer’s purse to let the dust escape.

“Stay alert,” Rimmer warns them intermittently, swinging around and around to keep an eye on all possible directions. He has his pistol cocked, a flare gun at his hip, and he’s wearing two pairs of underpants. He’s ready for anything. “Come on, folks, let’s keep up the pace—I’ve seen narcoleptic slugs move faster than you. Probably better-looking, too. Let’s go, let’s go.”

They make good time to the research station on the moon’s far side, and Rimmer stands aside while the first group get through the security doors. He keeps watch, pistol drawn, watching for movement amongst the rocks and rubble. Nothing yet. All clear. He doubts it’ll stay that way long.

Once all of group one is inside, Rimmer radios to let group two know that he’s on his way back, and then he sets off at a jog back towards the second pod. Now that he doesn’t have the others with him, he doesn’t need to take the long way around the crater; he doesn’t need to avoid the blood-smeared scene of carnage where an earlier research team met their sticky, gooey ends. He tries not to look too closely and he moves faster until the second pod comes into view.

Relief blooms in his chest and he takes deep, slow breaths so that when he reaches the remaining group, he won’t appear to be visibly frightened by the idea of being out here on his own and surrounded by unknown dangers.

Rimmer knocks on the door and says into his radio, “It’s me. The password is Mussoli—” As he speaks, he catches a glimpse of something moving in his peripheral vision. “Wait—”

He wheels around, snapping his pistol up to aim for whatever is coming up behind him—and then he stops dead.

Elbows locked, finger on the trigger, Rimmer doesn’t move. He stares down the sights and tries to make sense of what he is seeing. It’s not possible. There’s no way this can be happening—and yet there he is.

Rumpled in his boilersuit and leathers, unlaced boots, that ratty scrap of ribbon threaded into his locs, the wide curve of his smile.

Lister says, “Heya, smeghead.”

Rimmer’s throat closes off.

Far behind him, there is a voice, heard as though underwater: “Ace, what’s going on out there?”

“Lister,” Rimmer says hoarsely. There are so many things he wants to say, but he feels untethered from his own body and can’t think of a single thing, except— again, he says, “Lister.”

Across so many universes and so many years, he has seen Listers beyond count in a thousand different iterations and settled for second- and third-best at every turn—to be faced, now, with the real thing feels like he has had the wind stamped from his lungs. This Lister is exactly right in all the ways that Rimmer has never been able to articulate when faced with the intrinsic wrongness of the alternate versions. The spread of his stance, ever so slightly pigeon-toed when he stands with his hands in his pockets; the crust down the visible sliver of his long johns, the faint scent of onion bhajis emanating from his clothes; the soft bulk of him at the stomach and chest. The way he looks at Rimmer.

Rimmer’s heart is kicking so fast he feels nauseous.

Lister raises his eyebrows. “Smegging hell,” he says. “Gotta say, I was expecting a better reaction than that.”

Taking blind, shaky steps towards him, Rimmer manages, “I don’t understand. What—what are you doing here?”

Lister explains, and the way he puts it make perfect sense—yes, of course he’s here, in the wrong universe, at the exact moment that Rimmer is—Rimmer is—well, Rimmer can’t really remember what he’s doing here, to be honest, but once he’s got Lister back safely with him, then he can return to the job at hand.

Rimmer doesn’t know what to say or how to even start. He says, “I thought about you,” which seems like an understatement, and then, “But you’re here,” which is just useless and means almost as little as when he finds himself saying, “You’re not in space—in _Starbug,_ I mean.”

“I wanted to bring you home,” Lister says, with a helpless little shrug, as though to say, _well, what can you do?_ “I missed you, Arnold.”

Rimmer blinks. “What?”

“I missed you.”

It rattles around in Rimmer’s chest like a coin in a neglected charity box, a disappointing echo: _Arnold._ In his head, when he fantasises about them, he often imagines what it would be like if he and Lister had a normal relationship where they actually used each other’s names; he likes the idea, but to tell the truth, it always sounds just a touch off-kilter, wrong somehow, even only in his head. It sounds like this.

Rimmer takes a slow, faltering step back. He says hollowly, “He doesn’t call me that.”

He remembers now, what he is here on this moon for: psirens. This, it seems, is a particularly good one.

“Ace, what the smeg is going on out there?” Vicente’s voice drifts out to him from the observation pod, angrier and more insistent now. “Come on, let’s go!”

Rimmer can’t. If he leaves this psiren, it will cause chaos and disruption and then pick them all off, one by one. While this thing is alive, there is nowhere safe for any of them. Rimmer’s hand flexes on the pistol at his side and he tries to think about using it.

Over the years, Rimmer has talked about killing Lister a thousand times over—as a joke, a threat, a fervent promise—but never like this.

“What’s wrong?” Lister asks.

“I’m going to gloop you and be on my way,” Rimmer tells it, and his voice only shakes at the tail-end.

“Why?” Lister’s mouth tilts into that familiar teasing grin. “This isn’t about me toenail clippings, is it? Because honest, I didn’t mean to get them into your blanket. They just sort of scattered over there by accident.”

This seems wildly unfair. So far, Rimmer has done a pretty alright job of being a hero and now that is all going to be decisively flushed down the toilet, and once again, as _always_ , it is Lister’s fault.

Rimmer stares at the psiren, feeling cold and sick and unsteady, and he tries to imagine himself doing it. He tells himself it would be quick and easy. One gunshot and it’s over. His heart is throbbing high in his throat.

“Ace?” There are the irate voices of the scientists again. “Ace, what’s going on?”

“Is everything alright out there?”

“Is it safe yet?”

“Ace, get a move on!”

The voices come as though a thousand miles away or underwater, and Rimmer swallows around the sandpaper shape of nausea in his throat. He is teetering on the precipice of a panic attack, and he doesn’t want to shoot him—it—that—but he also doesn’t want to die.

Although, then again… maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, getting his brain slurped out—after all, it’s not as though Rimmer uses it much, anyway.

His heart feels as though it is beating under his tongue and his eyes are stinging. The pistol slips against Rimmer’s sweaty palm. He pulls it up to aim at Lister’s face. At the thing wearing Lister’s face.

Expressive dark eyes, almost red-brown round the pupil. Long eyelashes, crinkles that will settle into crows’ feet. The apples of his cheeks when he grins, the shape of his mouth, the curve of his lower lip. The way he looks at Rimmer.

“Oh, come on, as if you’re really gonna shoot us,” Lister says in disbelief—but it’s not Lister, Rimmer reminds himself, it has his voice and his face and his everything, but it isn’t him—and he takes a slow, rolling step forwards. “Stop being daft, man, and put that away.”

“I’m not being daft,” Rimmer says feebly, even as his gun hand wobbles and the sights waver dangerously. His finger isn’t actually on the trigger yet. He isn’t entirely sure that the safety catch is off.

“Flag down a cab for Real Street, will you?” Lister says, not unkindly, and takes another step closer. “I’m all you’ve got, Rimmer.”

“Not necessarily.” Rimmer should step back, keep some distance between them. He doesn’t.

“Oh, yeah? You’ve got lots going for you, have you?” Lister asks, and there’s pity in his voice now. “What’s it like, whinging to an audience of zero? When you get things your way all the time, when no-one challenges you or changes anything or so much as creases the smegging tablecloth, what do you even do to pass the time?” His smile twists to a sympathetic grimace. “Do you have more time for thinking about the future? About what a failure you are? About how no-one’s ever loved you?”

Rimmer swallows. “Not true,” he manages, voice small.

“Not true?” Lister echoes. “Yeah—yeah, that’s right, isn’t it? ‘Cause I do.”

There is a ferocious ache behind Rimmer’s ribs and his throat feels too small. He says nothing.

Lister steps closer still. The pistol muzzle wavers a few inches from his chest. “’Cause I love you,” he says, and a few things said by the thing wearing Lister’s face have been just a tad off, but the way he says that is exactly right. One more step, and the pistol muzzle comes to rest against his sternum. “If you’ve got nothing else, you’ve got me.”

“But you’re not real,” Rimmer croaks, strangled and shameful and terribly sad.

Lister seems to consider this, pulling a face. “I’m real enough, aren’t I?”

Rimmer lets out his breath.

Strangely, no.

This psiren is a projection of the version of Lister that lives in Rimmer’s head, the fantasy of him where he doesn’t call Rimmer names and he has a bath on a biweekly basis and he likes hearing about military strategy—but Lister isn’t like that. He’s slobby and disgusting and crude and lazy and infuriating, and he insults Rimmer ten times a day and he leaves his used tissues down the side of the mattress and he doesn’t always flush the loo and he uses stale naan as toasty soldiers for breakfast, and he’s _unbearable_ , and Rimmer loves him so dearly that another half-baked approximation simply will not do.

Rimmer says, “Not really,” and he clicks the safety catch off.

His hands are shaking. Behind him are the increasingly distressed voices of the people he is supposed to be saving. His heart is high in his throat and nausea rolls in his gut.

“Put down the gun, darlin’,” Lister says gently, and Rimmer shoots him.

There is an explosion of thick green goop, and the body that crumples, twitching, to the ground is that of an insectoid carapace, all curled legs and salivating probiscis.

Rimmer’s legs go from underneath him and he collapses to sit untidily on the ground. His vision is fogging into big, grey pixels at the edges, and his pulse seems far, far too loud.

Head bowed between his knees. Deep, slow breaths. Count to a hundred. Superheroes don’t faint. Superheroes _do not_ faint.

“Pull yourself together, Arnie,” he mutters under his breath, eyes squeezed tightly shut. “You are tough and strong and brave and desirable. Get a grip.”

When his head has stopped doing its best whirligig impersonation, Rimmer takes a deep breath, wipes his eyes—space grit, not tears—blows his nose on his hankie—a cold coming on, _not_ tears—wipes his eyes again—look, just sod off, alright?—and turns back to the observation pod.

“Right,” he calls imperiously, in a voice that is wobblier than he’d like, and raps sharply on the metal door. “Mussolini. Let’s go, chaps.”

He makes quick work of the next few trips, marching briskly ahead without a word to any of his convoy. On one trip, he is accosted by Yvonne McGruder, and he shoots her point black and feels no remorse whatsoever; on another, he is grabbed by Harrison Ford in a fedora, and Rimmer kicks him mercilessly off a cliff. He has lost all patience for this moon, this mission, this whole stupid sodding life.

At last, when the scientists are all safely restored to their research base and Rimmer’s shift and the helm of the S.S. Superman is over, he returns to _Wildfire._ He walks slowly back alone across the moon, and he isn’t _looking_ for anyone, he’s just sort of … checking. Glancing around and wondering if maybe someone will appear when he least expects it. Maybe over that ridge, or in the crater, maybe—but he’s alone out here.

As he reaches his ship, he pauses for a moment with his hand on the door, and he looks back, one more time, just in case. He scans the horizon. He gives it a minute, and then another. Nothing. No-one.

Slowly, Rimmer climbs back into _Wildfire._ He seals the hatch, drops heavily into his seat, and then sits motionless, making no move to take off.

A siren goes off above his head. Rimmer blinks, looks up, and sees Molly hovering on the screen in front of him. “What’s going on?” he asks, and removes his helmet.

Molly rolls her eyes. “Oh, good, you are alive.” The siren cuts off. “I’ve been trying to talk to you for an Ice Age. What’s wrong with you?”

Rimmer presses his fingers into his eye sockets. “Nothing. Nothing, I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m totally fine.” He takes a deep, steadying breath. “I’m fine.”

“So… you’re fine, are you?”

“I’m fine,” Rimmer says firmly, and starts the engine.

“Just out of curiosity, are you able to hear your voice when you say it? Because you sound like the saddest man in the universe.” When Rimmer doesn’t bite, Molly goes on merrily, twisting the machete. “You’re like a useless, astronaut Van Gogh. I’ve seen spam served as a gourmet meal which looked more cheerful than you are.”

“Okay, thank you, message received.”

“What’s the matter with you?”

Rimmer starts to make his way through the pre-take off checklist without looking at her. “Psirens,” he says, and leaves it at that.

“Oh.” For a long moment, Molly says nothing. Then quietly, she asks, “Was it Lister?”

“I… don’t want to talk about it, actually,” he says, and—okay, yes, that time he _does_ hear it. His voice is low, quiet, miserable. He sounds pathetic. Somehow, the realisation of how sad he is only acts as a perverse sort of Depression Catch-22, making him sadder and sadder, until he feels like an over-saturated sponge held precariously over an already slippery floor.

To her credit, for once Molly doesn’t push. She sits there in silence, like a good, proper A.I ship’s computer is supposed to, and she doesn’t make any smartarse comments when he stalls three times during take-off. They lift into the air and then soar through the empty blackness of space, and Rimmer wishes he hadn’t taken his helmet off. With the visor down, he could maybe get away with a cheeky little cry, but now he’s stuck with being macho and heroic and not indulging himself in a Pity Parade.

***

_Dear Diary,_

_No idea how long it’s been. Getting really smegging sick of this hero lark. I ate the Curly Wurly. It wasn’t even any good._

_But on the other hand, I did see a star go supernova recently. Really incredible, I was really grateful for it. I’d been trying to pop a spot on the side of my nose and the lights in_ Wildfire _had gone finicky—but that blast illuminated it perfectly, right in time for a good juicy squeeze._

_The star itself was a bit shit._

***

“I don’t mean to sound presumptuous,” Rimmer starts delicately, “but I believe you’ve overstayed your welcome.”

The tyrant King of the Kuiper Belt stares him unflinchingly down, eyes narrowed. “You’re Ace Rimmer?” he says after a beat. His gaze flicks, critical, up and down Rimmer’s body. “ _You_?”

Rimmer tries hard not to feel offended by this. “Yes, that’s right.”

“Hm.” The King looks as though he doesn’t quite believe it. “I was told I might expect you—but I have to say, I was anticipating some somewhat more physically imposing.” He looks over at the servant who let him in. “I thought you said he was surprisingly daunting.”

“Daunting? Oh—no, my liege, I’m sorry, look—” The servant scuttles nervously back into view and shows the King a clipboard, and they trace the lines of whatever is written there together. “See here—he’s—”

“Oh, yes, I see it. Surprisingly… _dainty_ , it was. My apologies—left my reading glasses in my other robes.”

Rimmer frowns.

“Come. Walk with me.” With comedically exaggerated effort, the King pushes himself up from his throne and stretches out a hand in Rimmer’s direction.

Rimmer takes his hand.

The King shoots him a perplexed, somewhat uncomfortable look, and withdraws his hand into the folds of his robes. Rimmer lets his hand fall awkwardly to his side.

“I hear you have some concerns about how I’m running things,” the King says, setting off at a leisurely pace across the room.

“Concerns shared by the Solar Federation, I’m afraid,” Rimmer says as he falls into step beside him. “We’ve seen more organised university pub crawls. What’s more, you seem to have the moral backbone of a figgy pudding.”

The King laughs. “I like you,” he says pleasantly. “You have a way with words.”

“And you have a way with terrorising ordinary, hard-working civilians throughout this part of the solar system,” Rimmer replies. “But alas, I am not here to make friends.”

As they reach the far side of the imperial throne room, they near the enormous, floor-to-ceiling, ornate open window which stares out over the heaving city, which Rimmer has been studiously trying not to look at. Now, as they come close, Rimmer swallows, eyeing the drop.

“Oh, there’s no need to worry,” the King says, noting Rimmer’s discomfort. “It’s quite safe. No-one, in over three hundred years, has ever accidentally fallen.”

Rimmer relaxes. “Look, you seem like a reasonable enough sort of lunatic despot,” he says to the King. “I just need to get you to give up your hold on Kuiper and then I can transmit up to the Infinity Fleet to say you’ve done it, and—hey presto, Bob’s your uncle—everything is fixed. Alright?”

The King sighs. “Oh, Ace. I wish it was that simple.”

“It could be,” Rimmer points out. “If you just—you know. Send a command over to the chaps in charge. _‘All done now, changed my mind, off you pop_ ’ kind of thing. ‘ _Toodle-oo, cheerio’_. I think they’d be quite amenable to—”

“We both know I’m not going to do that,” the King says calmly, turning to Rimmer. “Now—look. Believe it or not, you are not the first interplanetary superhero to come to me and try to interfere. We’ve always managed to come to some kind of agreement.” He cocks his eyebrows. “What’s your price?”

Rimmer sets his hands on his hips. “Really? A bribe?” he says, with a disparaging shake of his head. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but in one dimension, they made a ten-foot statue of me on a horse entirely out of Swarovski crystal. You can’t afford me.”

“Is that so?” the King replies. “Because I had heard a rumour that your heroic adventures are entirely at the behest of a dimension drive old enough to warrant its own exhibition in the British Museum—that you have no power over when and where you jump to.” He purses his lips, tutting, shaking his head, so condescending it makes Rimmer’s skin crawl. “Big superhero like you… surely, it’d be nice to have control over your own life?”

It takes Rimmer a moment to understand what the King is offering. “You have a way to upgrade my dimension drive?”

“You could choose the next universe at will,” the King says. “No more hopping randomly and hoping for the best. You could go where you like.”

He could go anywhere.

He could go _home._

Rimmer says nothing. He likes to think that, since becoming Ace, he has matured a fair deal. He has become a more responsible person, more inclined towards selflessness and decency, less tilted in favour of selling out everyone around him to get ahead. He knows right from wrong, and not in the abstract sense that he has always known that cheating on tests isn’t fair but gone along with it anyway because, _well, life’s not fair, toughen up_ ; he has a moral compass, now.

The only thing is that when said moral compass is based on learning right and wrong from Lister, that makes true north a little skewed when it comes to the chance to see him again.

Rimmer hesitates.

The King tips his head over to one side. “All I’m saying is think about it.”

He is thinking about it. He is thinking that saying yes would royally smeg over millions of people who currently live under the thumb of this tyrannical maniac, and many would die during his rule, and they would lose an opportunity for peace that might not come again for another lifetime—and he is thinking that Lister would be very cross if that’s what it cost for Rimmer to get home.

Then again, he doesn’t necessarily need to _tell_ Lister that.

He chews indecisively at a hangnail. “How would it work?” he asks, cagey. “The upgrade. Because I’m not much of an engineer. Is it just a plug it in and go type of thing, or…”

The King reaches into an inside pocket on his heavy, velvet-mail robe, and pulls out… a USB stick.

“Is that it?” Rimmer asks incredulously.

“It doesn’t need to be terribly complicated. As you say—a plug it in and go type of thing.” The King waggles it between finger and thumb. “And then all of both our problems will be solved.”

Rimmer stares at it.

He would really like to be able to say to Lister, when he does get home—if he does get home—that he didn’t enable the death of thousands of civilians as a by-product. He would really like to be, for the most part, proud of what he achieved as Ace, and unfashionable as it may be to admit, committing a war crime might put something of a dampener on his mood.

He thinks he will feel bad about it. It might even keep him up at night, maybe.

He falters. “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather just hand over—” he starts to say, and then he stops saying it because all seems rather pointless, given as he is no longer part of the conversation and instead, he is falling.

Somehow, this has all gone very wrong.

Smeg.

As he plummets down towards the ground, he has the presence of mind to think, _well, there’s that three hundred year gold streak gone. Trust me to be the poor stupid smegger to be the only person to ever accidentally—_ and then— _oh, I see._

He acknowledges that he was duped, like a little old lady shopping for pearls at a street market, and thinks morosely, _I was pushed._

Other than registering that thought, there’s not a great deal that he can do in the descent, nine storeys down from the open window. He’s too frightened to scream or cry. He pisses, just a little, and he watches the ground screaming faster and faster towards him, and then he hits the ground. Feet first.

Rimmer must black out because when he comes back into possession of his own body, he is curled helplessly forwards, the side of his head pressed hard into the ground. The pain is segmented, disjointed. Kneecaps shattered. Hips splintered. Spine snapped. At least, that’s the bare minimum of what he imagines the damage would be, if he were an ordinary human being dropped from nine storeys to land feet-first on solid ground.

He would be dead, were he not helpfully already dead. More specifically, he should be a sort of meaty soup pooled around his own femurs, but once his trusty hardlight drive comes to the rescue so that he remains perfectly intact. He is alive. He is all in one piece. He only _feels_ as though his entire body has been pulverised.

Slowly, he keels over onto his side with a dull _thump_. He pulls his knees up to his chest, reuniting with his old, faithful friend—the foetal position—and he squeezes his eyes tightly shut. He prays for rescue, or death—he’s not picky, really—but as the minutes crawl by, he gradually realises that neither of those options are going to happen, because no-one is coming for him. The initial realisation incapacitates him all over again, and he cries until his throat hurts and there is still no rescue.

He is going to have do this on his own.

Nothing for it. Rimmer wipes his face, takes one last deep snivelling tear-filled breath, and then hauls himself up onto his feet. Of course, he’s not _happy_ about it. He pushes through the sensation of being certain that every bone in his legs is broken beyond repair, because apparently this is just a regular Tuesday afternoon for your average superhero, suck it up and get over it.

“Right,” Rimmer says, straightening his flight suit, and he takes a deep breath to fill himself with the haughty energy of the injudiciously outraged. “ _Right_.”

He steadies himself as he walks, at first staggering as though drunk, and then striding out with purpose in the direction of the Imperial Palace. As he nears the gate, he comes up to two guardsmen who have been standing, slack -jawed, watching his approach—including the part where he fell from a nine-storey building, had a nervous breakdown curled up on the ground, and then walked it off.

The guardsmen look at him, and then look at each other, and briefly at their ceremonial pikes as though entertaining the idea that really, they should probably do what they’re paid for and try to stop him. Ultimately, they seem to think better of it, especially when Rimmer barks _“Move_ ,” at them and shoves past.

Up the grand sweeping staircase, through the miles and miles of labyrinthine corridors—occasionally stopping to snap at a guard, _where the smeg am I and how do I get to the top floor?_ when he realises that he is hopelessly disoriented—up another flight of stairs, and then another—stopping to demand whether there isn’t a smegging lift in this godforsaken palace—past countless staff who do not stop him, so at least they’ve got the memo.

At last, at long bloody last, Rimmer reaches the old imperial throne room and barges in through the double doors without so much as a knock or a _please sir may I come in_.

“Well, then,” Rimmer grits out through his teeth, swaying in the doorway. “I’ve had about as much of this as I’m willing to take, and I’m getting properly fed up now.”

The King’s face blanches. “Bloody hell,” he says. “Didn’t I throw you out of a window?”

“You certainly did, and if you try it again, I’ll be taking you with me.”

“But—how—it’s not possible for you to have—”

“Tell your guards to stand down or they’ll find out what else it’s possible for me to do,” Rimmer says.

He hopes fervently that the King won’t call his bluff on this one, because heaven only knows he’s no good in a fight and the likeliest outcome of what is possible is nothing nearly so tough as Rimmer is implying, but rather him crying on the floor again. Then again, at the minute Rimmer is feeling distinctly all cried out, so who knows what could happen?

The King raises a hand and indicates for his guards to stand down. “My, my. You’re tougher than a Madonna face-lift,” he remarks, sounding almost admiring in his tone. “I should’ve known it’d take more than that to undo you.”

Rimmer is not entirely happy with that turn of phrase, but it seems unnecessarily petty to start quibbling semantics with the man who only recently defenestrated him.

“Very well,” the King declares, and makes such a show of shrugging free of his outer robe that Rimmer panics and feels the need to double-check he’s in the right place. “Then I challenge you.” He spreads his arms wide. “You and I—may the better man win.”

Hopefully not. Rimmer very much doubts he could ever be categorised as the better man. Half the time he barely thinks he even qualifies as a man.

“You just threw me out of a window and I walked it off,” Rimmer says dubiously, “and now want to duel?”

The King’s face spreads into a thin smile. “You are not indestructible,” he says, his tone low and measured, as he regards Rimmer with a critical eye, like a wine connoisseur eyeing up a Lambrini. “I would very much like to be the one to take you apart.”

Rimmer gulps. Well, then. It seems that no amount of weasel cowardice will get him out of this one—nothing for it. He carefully pushes his sleeves up past his elbows, cracks his knuckles, and tries to get stuck in.

He strides purposefully up to the King and is immediately punched square in the nose for his troubles. He reels back, hits the floor, scrabbling and swearing and trying to stem the blood spilling from his nostrils, while the King looms over him and laughs. It’s all rather more dastardly than Rimmer is inclined to enjoy, but there’s little to be done to resolve that issue other than by knocking the smug little smile off the King’s face, and from Rimmer’s current vantage point, that’s looking unlikelier than a ski slope in July.

“Come on, Ace Rimmer,” the King taunts. “Get up.” He then kicks Rimmer in the head—which hurts.

Rimmer hears the back of his skull crack against the flagstones, and then hears himself make a very unheroic whimper. He rolls himself onto his side so that the next kick lands on his shoulder, rather than on his face—old faithful foetal position coming to the rescue once again—and when the King steps in to grab him, to try and haul him up to keep brawling, Rimmer jabs his foot out and sends him flying arse over tit.

The King crashes to the floor hard with a gasp. His crown falls off his head and clatters across the stone. From his pocket falls something small and shiny—the USB.

“Right, that is _it,”_ Rimmer gasps out, and shifts back onto his knees to drag himself upright. “I have had enough; do you hear me? I have honestly had it up to here with getting the smeg kicked out of me and nearly dying and being expected to save the world for people who aren’t even grateful—I’m completely smegging sick of it, and you know what? I’m done fannying on trying to take the moral high road. The moral high road is a nightmare. It’s like the M1 at rush hour and everyone is beeping at me for driving too slowly. I’m taking the low road,” he snaps, and he draws his pistol and he shoots the King in the face.

There is a spray of blood, like a thumb over the end of a garden hose.

Then Rimmer turns and neatly vomits onto the flagstones.

Turns out that actually point-blank execution is not nearly as tidy and sanitary as it seems in the films. It’s certainly a lot wetter than Rimmer expected—and that thought leads Rimmer to make the mistake of looking at the corpse. He has the presence of mind to grab the USB, at least, and then he starts retching anew.

Across the room, the guards seem paralysed, staring in open horror at Ace Rimmer, King murderer, and the copious bodily fluids that he is seemingly hell-bent on ejecting.

“Should we… do something?” one of them asks the other nervously.

“I dunno,” his partner replies. “I don’t have any antacids or anything.”

“No, you twonk, I mean like, arrest him?!”

This all transpires shortly before Rimmer finds himself seized by the arms and forced onto his knees to be cuffed.

“Oh, shit,” Rimmer says. He hadn’t really thought ahead much further than ‘ _shoot dictator dead’_ —now what?

The answer to that question, it seems, is a cold cell, a short trial, and a humiliating walk to the gallows.

The scaffold itself, Rimmer gathers, is something of a formality, something lending a touch of gravitas to the firing squad; Rimmer would sorely love to say that it’s unmerited as he won’t actually be here long enough to be executed, but the jury is still out on that one. He knows that he has managed to successfully transmit his message to the nearby Infinity Fleet—he spent forty-five minutes tapping out a mayday in Morse code from his prison cell—T-O—W-H-O-M—I-T—M-A-Y—C-O-N-C-E-R-N—and explained his situation. He supposes that’s one benefit of the scaffold being mounted so close to the radio satellite. However, the odds of anyone arriving in time to rescue him are becoming increasingly unlikely, especially as someone is already loading the rifle.

Nearby, someone is muttering feverishly to themselves: _Oh God, oh God, oh smeg bollocks shit fuck oh no oh Jesus Christ alive oh shit._

One of the guards slaps Rimmer around the back of the head. “Shut up. Stop your pathetic whinging.”

Oh. Rimmer is the one making that noise, that semi-hysterical litany of panic. Good to know.

The guard then jabs him forwards with a rifle muzzle in the small of his back. Rimmer yelps and jerks away, and very seriously considers being sick again.

He doesn’t want this. He doesn’t want to die. He wants to eat mashed potatoes and wear his dressing gown and have sex a few more times; he wants to become an officer and a name a planet after himself and drink expensive port; he wants to see Lister again.

Tears are smarting in his eyes.

The guard jabs him forwards again. “Any last words?”

Rimmer gulps. “Fancy a game of Risk?”

There is a pause, a silence in which Rimmer can palpably feel the bewilderment that radiates from his executioners—but if they go for it, Risk should buy him a few hours of stalling time at least.

He tries something else. “Or a marathon of _Lord of the Rings_ , extended edition?”

“Nope,” the guard says at last, and produces a thick, woollen blindfold. Rimmer lets out another thoroughly undignified noise, squeezes his eyes tightly shut as the blindfold is fastened, and then he waits for oblivion.

He is nudged forwards, he shuffles where he is directed, he catches his toe on something—shit—trips, grabs for something to hold onto, except whatever he grabs is no help at all, some kind of lever that crunches into a different gear— _oh shit, someone grab him—no someone get the_ —and then as a high-pitched mechanical whizzing starts, he sprawls over something else warm and solid— _oof!—Hey, watch where you’re pointing that thing—_ a bang, a sharp metallic ping— _look out, look—_ and then a deafening, ear-rattling crash—a gunshot cracks out.

Rimmer flinches, but he’s still alive somehow. There is a spray of something wet down the side of his face, but as long as it’s not his blood, that’s not his problem.

Another crash, a grinding of metal, a horrible meaty sort of _squish_ , and then silence.

Tentatively, Rimmer shimmies forwards on his knees, and when no-one stops him, he begins to crawl in earnest, moving as fast he can with every iota of earthworm courage he can muster.

He scrambles through damp earth, through something smelling not unlike a Portaloo at a music festival, over what is definitely a dead body, and he just tunes it all out and keeps crawling. When he feels himself crawling over grass, he lets himself relax a fraction; when he starts hitting branches and smacking his knuckles on tree roots, he judges that he is probably far enough to be safe.

Rimmer sits back on his heels and rummages with his cuffed hands to undo his blindfold. Away the fabric falls and—Rimmer screams. A tiny dribble of urine leaks down his leg.

Oh, Jesus Christ.

It’s not that bad, actually, Rimmer reflects as his heart stops trying to burst violently from his chest. The grotesque monster face that he had found himself face first with is actually no more than a fallen statue of the dead King—which admittedly does look as though it has brained someone on the way down, but that’s hardly Rimmer’s fault, and he’s getting very good at compartmentalising all the gore that he’s been witness to recently.

To tell the truth, he is still struggling to understand how he has managed to come out of this ordeal intact. He looks back over his shoulder and recoils, aghast.

“Oh, smeg.”

He gazes out in horror at the scene of absolute carnage that unfolds before him, and he fails to make any logical sense of it. The scaffold has collapsed, and is also on fire; everyone is dead; the radio satellite has been snapped clean off and the leader of the police guard has been impaled by the antenna… How on Io has he managed to take out _everyone_ and their equipment without even looking?

…All he did was fall over.

There’s no time or mulling that over now. He needs a get a move on and scarper, pronto.

He crawls until he can waddle, and then waddles until he can sever the ropes knotted round his ankles and wrists, and then he sets off at a brisk, purposeful walk that melts into a terrified sprint along the way, seized by the fear of what will happen if he were caught again.

At last, up ahead he can see the silver sheen of _Wildfire_ ’s fuselage, and relief hits him, with a whimper, like an eight-foot rugby player. He survived. He made it out. He’s going to be alright.

As he strides up the hill towards his ship, he goes on an emotional seesaw of Himalayan proportions, vacillating wildly between gratitude and being totally, utterly, completely, definitively smegged off.

He can see his reflection in the glass of the canopy—blood-spattered, dishevelled, haggard and sleepless, looking rougher than a night out in Hull—and it takes everything in him not to throw a tantrum. This is _not_ what he signed up for.

When he slaps a hand to the canopy panel to get the cockpit open, he only very distantly registers that he leaves a smeared handprint of blood on the glass. He doesn’t think about it. He just climbs in and sits down heavily in the pilot’s seat.

“Cor, you took your time, didn’t you?” Molly says. “Job done?”

“I’m not doing this anymore,” Rimmer says, by virtue of a response.

“Oh. Job not done, then, I s’pose.”

“No, it’s fine, it’s all sorted. The job is done and so am I.”

“What happened?”

“Well, let’s see.” Rimmer starts ticking off his fingers. “I was insulted, thrown out of a window, felt like I suffered through an absolutely horrific gruesome death—thank God for hardlight—went back up to start the whole sorry bloody fight again, got challenged to a—to a smegging _duel—_ yes, you heard me right, a duel, for fuck’s sake—killed a dictator at point-blank, which by the way, is not nearly as great as it sounds, was imprisoned, crawled my way away from the firing squad, and then fought my way back here.”

Molly’s eyebrows are nearly to her hairline. “Sounds like quite a day,” she says, her voice admirably restrained.

“It was awful,” Rimmer bursts out, and much to his humiliation, he can feel the hot sting of tears biting behind his eyes and nose again. “It was awful and terrifying and painful and unfair and so absolutely _shit,_ and I don’t want to do it again. I don’t want to do this anymore.” He rubs roughly at his eyes with the pads of his fingers, as though he can stop himself from starting to cry by sheer brute force. “I don’t want to do this anymore, Molly, I’m finished.”

“Arnold—”

“I got thrown out of a _window_ ,” Rimmer repeats, louder and more emphatic this time. “Nine storeys down and—and—and just because I survived it doesn’t mean—it didn’t _feel_ like I survived it. It felt—it felt—and I don’t want to—I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.”

The words hiccup out of him in a rough croak, and that’s when he realises that he has failed in his attempts not to cry, and he is weeping like an asthmatic nerd on Sports Day. His chest hurts and his throat is raw and his hands are shaking where he has covered his face with his hands, and for once Molly is silent, and somehow that’s worse than her merciless sarcasm.

He can’t live like this: constant, mind-numbing terror that he is going to be killed, that he is never going to see Lister again before he is shot out of the sky or electrocuted or swallowed by an electromagnetic pulse or crushed in a black hole. He might take a direct hit to the lightbee; he might be imprisoned and left to rot until he runs out of power; he might get eaten by something hairy and horrible and slavering, and he isn’t even talking about Lister. He wants to live. He wants to go home and be happy, and for once in his life, he feels like he might even deserve it.

Breathing in deep gulps, Rimmer tries to get control of himself. He scrubs at his face with both palms, counts to ten, recites the dates of Napoleonic victories, imagines his father telling him to stop being pathetic, all of his usual tactics—but it feels like he has pulled the plug on the world’s biggest bathtub of despair and it’s no good.

“Look, Arnold,” Molly says softly. “You’ve had a tough day. Why don’t you whack me on autopilot and go have a kip in the back ‘til you stop being a fanny?”

“I’m not being a fanny!” Rimmer shouts. “Funnily enough, I don’t think it’s insane not to want to be thrown out of windows, actually! Call me demanding and difficult if you like, but personally I’m not a big fan of being tossed to my death like a Spartan infant, and if I had my way I would probably choose to never be defenestrated again, and I don’t think that’s too unreasonable!”

“You’ve been Ace for, what, maybe a decade now?” Molly points out. “And you’ve been thrown out of a window once. I would hardly call that a recurring issue—”

“Being thrown out of a window shouldn’t happen at all!” Rimmer cuts across. “I never wanted to do this, but I did it. I never wanted to be a hero, but I did it. I never wanted to leave home and sleep in a sardine tin and save lives and overthrow dictators, but I did it, because I got told that the universe needed me to, but I am _finished_ , and it can be someone else’s responsibility. I’ve hated every smegging second of being a hero, but I did it anyway, and I deserve to get to go home and be happy afterwards.” He exhales sharply, releasing all the pent-up air in his chest. “And having a smegging kip in this bloody metal coffin is not going to change my mind on that. I want to go home.”

There is a long silence between them, broken only by the sound of Rimmer sniffing wetly and trying to get his breathing under control. Onscreen, Molly looks—for once—sincerely contrite, and several times she takes a breath as though about to speak, and then seems to think better of it.

Rimmer fumbles for a hankie and blows his nose in one loud, despondent honk.

“Look, Arn,” Molly says at last, her voice low and gentle. “I’m genuinely not trying to be difficult here—but you know it’s impossible. You know the dimension drive can’t choose where it goes. It’s not a Woolworths Pick ‘N Mix, alright, it’s flipping through thousands of different realities.”

Rimmer rubs at one eye with the heel of his hand. “But now I’ve got a USB stick that should fix the problem,” he says.

Molly blinks. “You what?”

“I’ve got a USB stick that should fix the problem,” Rimmer repeats, louder and more aggressively. “God, you need to get your microphones tested.”

“Yeah, but what do you mean, it should fix the problem?”

Rimmer shrugs limply. He doesn’t look at her, but focuses instead of fiddling about with the edges of his hankie, where some of the stitching is coming loose. “I dunno,” he mumbles, feeling very like a toddler at the end of a tantrum in a supermarket—all cried out and cross and brimming with self-pity. “The King gave it to me. Said it could upgrade our drive.”

For a beat, Molly is speechless, gawping. Then she bursts out with, “Well, why the smeg didn’t you open with that, you daft git?!”

Rimmer flinches. “I didn’t know whether it would work,” he says defensively.

“We certainly won’t know whether it works if it lives in your bleeding pocket the whole time. Where is it?”

Rimmer fishes it out from the inside pocket of his flight suit, and with shaking fingers, goes to plug it in.

The first time he tries, he gets the USB stick the wrong way up. He swears, flips it over and tries again, and somehow it is _still_ the wrong way around. He turns it back the first way round and for some smegging reason, this time it works.

There is a moment in which nothing happens.

“Should I turn it off and on again?” Rimmer asks.

“Hang on, give it a mo.”

Rimmer clucks impatiently and folds his arms across his chest.

“Besides,” Molly says, “even if theoretically it does work, you can’t run it without me.”

The little light on the side of the USB has come on. Rimmer’s mouth fall opens. “It’s on, it’s on! It’s working! It’s—hang on, what do you mean, I can’t run it without you? You’re—you’re a computer. You have to do as I say.”

“Not true,” Molly says. “The dimension drive runs when I tell it to run, and even if it gets upgraded, that’s still the case. And I’m not running it ‘til you find some other sorry bastard to rope into being Ace.”

“Oh, what?” Rimmer complains. “Why?”

“You really think I’m gonna let you scarper and leave me to hunt round all of space and time for another Rimmer willing to throw his life away? Not on your ugly, worthless little life, mate.”

“But what if I can’t find another Rimmer willing to be Ace?” Rimmer whines.

Molly arches her eyebrows. “Then you go on looking. Annoying, isn’t it? Welcome to the last million years.”

“Uggghhhh,” Rimmer says, and puts his head on the dashboard.

***


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’d like to dedicate this chapter to Mr. Barrie’s turtleneck. Also, I know originally was supposed to be six chapters, but that's looking more like eight at this point. Whoops!

**CHAPTER SIX**

By this point, Rimmer has got the sales pitch down to an art form. He’s fairly certain that he could rope Mr. Bean into becoming the next Ace Rimmer, at this point. He could give the teleshopping channel a run for its money. He could sell socks to sheep. He’s an expert, plain and simple, and yet—and _yet_ —the customer he most needs to convince is the one who remains perfectly unwilling.

“Run this by me one more time,” the other Rimmer says, steepling his fingers thoughtfully.

“Okay,” Rimmer says.

“You spend all your time risking your neck for other people all across time and space, narrowly escaping death on countless occasions.”

“Yes,” Rimmer says.

“And you don’t get paid for this.”

“No,” Rimmer says.

“And you’re trapped alone in deep space with an A.I who, by the sounds of it, hates you.”

Rimmer hesitates. Does Molly really _hate_ him? He considers this, and then: “Yes,” he says.

“And you’ve spent the last four years living in a ship the size of a shoebox.”

“Well, that’s not exactly fair,” Rimmer protests. “For a start, shoeboxes have quite a bit of spare room—or else why would they have to stuff all that packing paper in the corners?”

The other Rimmer’s frown deepens. “So… why on Titan would I want this position? From the sounds of it, I’d rather let Helen Keller give me a circumcision.”

“No, no, it’s really great—honestly, it’s terrific,” Rimmer insists. “It’s loads of fun. And… and loads of people want to have sex with you.”

The other Rimmer’s eyes narrow in suspicion. “Like who?”

“Like people!”

“What people?”

“Just—loads of them. Loads of people.”

“Like _who_?”

Rimmer’s mouth flaps uselessly for a second. The only names jumping immediately to mind are, unfortunately, Lister, Lister, and Lister. Oh, wait, no—there was also… Lister. Shit.

“You’re making this up.”

“I am not!” Rimmer argues, deeply incensed by the very suggestion.

“If it’s so great and wonderful and amazing, then why are you trying to sack it off?” the other Rimmer accuses.

Well, he’s got Rimmer there.

“I’m not trying to sack it off, I just—I just—don’t want to do it anymore, that’s all.”

The other Rimmer raises his eyebrows. “And that’s different from just… sacking it off… how, exactly?”

There’s a very small semantic difference, Rimmer would argue, but somehow he doesn’t think that this point is likely to convince the other Rimmer at all. He takes a deep breath.

“The lifecycle of an Ace Rimmer is supposed to be—well, it’s your whole life. It’s supposed to be dead man’s boots, except I rather like my boots. I rather like being in them. I’d really like to do away with that particular tradition, not least because I’ve died once already and I don’t really fancy giving it an encore. You’re right, being Ace is shit. Not always, not necessarily. Sometimes it’s very glamorous. Sometimes you get treated like a god or a rock star or a member of BTS, but it’s not all caviar and blowjobs. Sometimes you get scared to death and no-one is willing to help you, and sometimes you go space crazy going through wormholes and come out feeling like your brain has been squeezed through a Playdoh sausage machine and sometimes you get beaten up rather badly and sometimes people are horrible to you, and sometimes—sometimes you just—you just—feel rather homesick.” It feels pathetic to admit out loud to anyone, even to another Rimmer, but this little monologue of his is the first true thing he’s said so far. “It’s pretty good sometimes. It’s pretty terrible, too. But it’s not me, and I don’t want to be doing this forever. I don’t want to die doing this.”

“What, you’d rather die fat and decrepit in bed somewhere in space than go out in a blaze of glory?” the other Rimmer says dubiously.

Rimmer gives a bland smile. “Live slow, die boring,” he says. “Abso-smegging-lutely.”

For a moment, the other Rimmer is silent. “I don’t know.”

“Hey, if you want to die in a blaze of glory, then by all means,” Rimmer says. “Be my guest. Here—have the wig. Go ahead.”

“I don’t want your poxy wig.”

“Why not? It’s quite fetching, actually. I got used to it after a while and felt pretty good in it. Especially when there’s a stiff breeze and it flows like—you know what, never mind. It’s not important. Do you want the job or not?”

The other Rimmer stares at him. “No.”

Rimmer slumps. “Why not?” he whinges, feeling pathetic and not entirely above grovelling at somebody’s feet for a day off. “What if I say pretty pretty please with a supernebula on top?”

“Not for a thousand supernebulae.”

“A thousand and one.”

“We’re not haggling, Arnold. Get off my ship.”

Rimmer huffs and reluctantly does as he’s told. Another universe down, another few thousand to go.

***

 _No thank you,_ says the Rimmer from 232, and _not smegging likely,_ says the Rimmer from 576. It’s _no chance_ from 882 and _no way_ from 1002 and _not on your life_ from 046 and 904 turns off all the lights and pretends not to be in. One Rimmer wouldn’t even let them dock in the hangar, instead playing an unconvincing Hammond Organ rendition of _Greensleeves_ in place of hold music when Rimmer tries to establish contact.

“All quite happy to take my help, aren’t you?” Rimmer shouts into the crackling comms line. “But God forbid when I need some help…”

Another Rimmer pretends not to speak English; another runs away in an escape pod, and the currently reigning Rimmer is starting to get pretty seriously hacked off by all this. How smegging difficult can it really be to find just one moron willing to step up to the plate? Christ, it’s a miracle there’s a legacy at all.

“Surely it can’t always be this onerous,” he complains to Molly, loudly and at length.

“Well, yeah, it is, actually,” she replies. “Why d’you think we were so desperate to recruit your ugly mug?”

That is a thought more depressing than Rimmer is currently equipped to handle. He tries bribery and gets a longwinded lecture about ethics, and tries blackmail—another lecture, this time on being a snivelley, snidey coward—and being genuinely helpful is right out, so Rimmer is more or less stuffed.

“Calling all Rimmers,” he declares through a megaphone echoing in the far reaches of space. “Calling any and all Rimmers—literally, any Rimmer anywhere—I am looking for a superhero with my face and my hair and my everything, and I am willing to pay.”

He opts to gloss over the fact that payment would be through the currency of pride in a job well done, and a yearly bonus of a hearty pat on the back. They can get to salary negotiations later.

Either way, there is no response, just a vast, echoing silence, broken only by the sound of Molly idly clicking her tongue. After a few minutes of waiting painfully for an answer, Rimmer sighs and turns the comms off.

“Right,” he says brightly, in an attempt to stay positive, clinging to that silver lining by its smegging toenails. “Next universe?”

***

_Dear Diary,_

_3000 and something days. I don’t know. I hate this. I want to go home. I want to go home. I want to give up on this bastarding useless cockwanking shitfuck piece of smeg job and be a normal person again. Or at least, I want to be me again—I don’t know how “normal” I can claim to be, as Molly is only too fond of reminding me._

***

“Look, this is hurting me as much as it’s hurting you,” Rimmer says plaintively. “Now, will you stop struggling and just come with me?”

Through a mouthful of old sock, the other Rimmer shrieks for help.

His feet scrabble desperately along the floor, seeking purchase to dig his heels in and resist, but to little avail. One bonus of spending an indeterminate number of years as an intergalactic James Bond means that Rimmer has actually built up a fair bit of upper body strength—or at least, considerably more than this Rimmer, who would struggle to fight his way out of a wet paper bag.

“Come _on_ ,” Rimmer grits out, hauling him stubbornly towards the lifts. “I haven’t got all day, you know.”

The other Rimmer starts rambling incomprehensibly in the fluent tongue of a man trying hard not to choke to death on a sock, and tries to turn himself into dead weight, adding extra pressure to the bungee cord of Rimmer’s already frayed mood.

“Let’s _go_ , you overgrown haemorrhoid!” Rimmer snaps. “We’re losing daylight.” Either that, he reckons, or losing his smegging marbles.

He struggles with the other Rimmer, dragging him in great heaves like he’s trying to get a shopping bag loaded with too many cans up the front steps, and he almost makes it. Almost. He slaps a hand to the button which opens the airlock, and then he hears it.

“Hold it, MC Hammer,” comes a familiar voice from behind Rimmer. “You take a step further and you get one of these in the back of the head.”

Panic flashes through Rimmer and he instantly drops the other Rimmer to the ground in an inelegant heap. “Don’t shoot!” he squeaks, and whirls around with his hands in the air. “I can explain.”

At the other end of the corridor stands Lister, Kryten, and the Cat, looking pissed off and ready for action—although not with weapons. In Lister’s hands is a carton of eggs. Kryten is holding a fistful of eggshells and has a sticky mess down one leg, and seems completely unaware that anything is amiss.

“Let him go,” Lister says, hefting an egg in one hand.

“Why?” Rimmer whines, clinging onto his captive for dear life. “I don’t see what the problem is—you don’t even like him!”

The Cat looks over at Lister. “I mean, the dude makes a point.”

Lister ignores this. “Doesn’t matter. He’s ours, now give him back.”

“I can’t, I need him,” Rimmer says. “Look, it’s actually really important—a big opportunity for him, really. It’s an honour—he’ll love it.”

The other Rimmer shrieks at his feet. Rimmer kicks him.

“Yeah, he seems dead enthusiastic,” Lister says. “You’ve got ten seconds to drop him before I start chucking shit. And when I run out of eggs, I’ll start breaking fingers.”

“Look, I’m not the baddie here,” Rimmer tries to tell them. “I’m not kidnapping him, not really—I’m just borrowing him for a little while, for the good of the universe. I’ve actually got a whole letter written out. If you give me a second, I can get it and you can read all about how—”

The first egg hits him, with devastating precision, right between the eyes.

***

There is a universe where Kristine Kochanski is Ace, and one where Rimmer died in the accident and wasn’t resurrected as a hologram, and one where Lister is Rimmer’s superior—which causes Rimmer to break out in hives, or so it feels to him—but nowhere, _nowhere_ is there a Rimmer willing to swap places so that he can go home.

In between jumps, he endlessly redrafts his plaintive letter for assistance, gradually making it ever more melodramatic each time. He writes in his journal, when he remembers to, but his life is so uneventful that there is honestly less than nothing to say. Once he entertained the notion of writing to Lister, but didn’t get very far with it… couldn’t even get past what to call him—Lister? Dave? Listy? David? Instead, he rips out the page and eats it.

Besides, as he points out to Molly afterwards, there’s no point writing to Lister because:

  1. There’s no way to send it to him,
  2. His best bet would be delivering by hand, in which case it’s moot point anyway, and
  3. Rimmer’s not entirely confident that Lister is actually able to read.



So he just carries on hopelessly searching and complaining and trying not to feel homesick.

He has lost all sense of time and self-preservation by the time they come to 886, a universe where they stumble across _Starbug_ trying to haul itself free of a particularly nasty bog on an S3 planet’s surface, intent on sucking them into the mud.

Once they touch down on a rare spit of solid land, Rimmer sits for a moment trying to summon the energy to go out there and be a hero again. He slaps his gloves idly into the palm of his hand, again and again, lips pursed.

“Ready to get back on the ol’ bicycle, are we?” Molly asks cheerfully.

“Piss off,” Rimmer tells her.

“Got your helmet ready? And your spandex?”

Rimmer ignores this and opens the cockpit door.

Luckily, it’s not far to _Starbug_ from _Wildfire’s_ landing site, as Rimmer scrambles through mud and vines and leech-infested waters towards them. What he finds when he arrives, however, is entirely unexpected: standing in knee-deep, stagnant water, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, straining at a lever jammed under the fuselage, is Arnold Judas Rimmer.

Rimmer stops dead and stares.

This makes no sense. Arnold Rimmer, tall and strong; Arnold Rimmer, vibrantly alive and confident and… helpful. Even his hair seems somehow flatter, smoother, the curl more artfully dishevelled than the wild insanity that he’s accustomed to.

After a moment, someone pops out of the top hatch of _Starbug_ —stocky, sweaty, stupid—and announces, “Found it! Wasn’t in the midsection like you said, it was—” That’s when this universe’s approximation of Lister spots Rimmer.

Unsure of what else to do, Rimmer lifts one hand in an awkward half-wave.

Lister’s eyes widen, and he runs a hand over the top of his head. “Hey, we’ve got company.”

The other Rimmer straightens up, hands braced on his hips, and looks over. His shirt clings to his chest and shoulders like he’s some kind of poxy stupid supermodel for mud-spattered uniform. There is sweat artistically beaded on his brow, and when he scrapes a hand backwards through his hair, it lies like some kind of budget Renaissance painting, the bastard. “Well, I say,” he declares. “It’s me, only devilishly handsome.”

Rimmer’s shoulders sag. Oh Christ, not this again.

“Pinch me, I’m dreaming,” Lister says, and Rimmer feels his ears heat up.

He steels himself, draws himself up tall, and says brusquely. “I’m Ace Rimmer. Intergalactic superhero—you look like you use with a hand.”

“I could use two,” the other Rimmer says brightly with a wink, and Rimmer’s nose wrinkles, but he trudges through the mud anyway to assist.

“How on Titan did you get into this mess in the first place?” Rimmer mutters, picking his way carefully across the goop and sludge via the sturdiest clumps of vegetation he can find—and then slipping to sink up to his knees with a yelp. “Smeg!”

“Careful, there, Ace!” the other Rimmer calls and throws out a hand to steady him. “It’s deeper than it looks. Are you alright?”

“Yes, yes, fine,” Rimmer grumbles, shrugging away from the contact. Great. Just fan-smegging-tastic—another universe where he shows up to somehow be less cool and composed than the people he’s supposed to be rescuing. “Right. What are we doing?”

The other Rimmer nods briskly, and starts pointing out the problems. “Both the starboard thrusters are out of commission and the whole side of the ‘ _Bug_ is currently sinking into this here swamp, fast. We’re trying to brace the fuselage to stop it sinking so we can repair it, but we’ve also got to contend with a broken landing strut dangerously wedged underneath the primary thruster. There’re two dashing chaps inside working on stabilising the fuel, but if we can’t get this green birdy out of this sewage pronto, we’ll be sinking quicker than a _Dixie Chicks_ album in Texas.”

Rimmer pulls a face at this. “Not ideal.”

“You could say that again,” the other Rimmer says with a grimace.

Well. Obediently, Rimmer says, “Not ideal.”

The other Rimmer flicks a frown across at him. Up close, this new Rimmer is not exactly identical—aside from the obvious, that is, like the fact that he is clearly rather brave and handsome. He has normal-sized ears, mostly; he has no Adam’s apple; the curve of his nose is more pronouncedly aquiline, although Rimmer sulkily speculates that people probably don’t take the piss out of _his_ nostrils quite so much. He is shorter, slimmer… quite a bit stronger too, if the way that he was effortlessly cranking that lever to lift _Starbug_ out of the muck is any indication.

Rimmer folds his arms and looks over. “Plan?”

“Oh, yes. Lift the fuselage, replace the broken landing strut, engage amphibian treads…” The other Ace—Rimmer, that is—shit—runs a hand chivalrously over the nearby landing strut, which is buried to the elbow in mud.

“Then sit pretty while we do repairs,” this universe’s Lister says from above.

The other Rimmer lifts his head with the narrow flash of a grin. “Speak for yourself, old love.”

Rimmer rolls his eyes. It seems to him that the easiest way to stop this idiotic flirt-fest from taking place over his head is to get stuck in, and so he rolls his sleeves up and does just that. He and the other Rimmer return to the lever to try to lift the fuselage, while Lister works at lifting the thrusters and jamming some sheets of ratty old metal panelling underneath the thrusters to prevent them sinking again—without much success, it must be said.

“So, erm,” Rimmer says, bracing his knees for the next big _three, two, one, PUSH_. “What do they call you? To pre-empt the Arnold One, Arnold Two dilemma.”

The other Rimmer frowns. “The what?”

“You know, having two Rimmers.”

“Of course!” the other Rimmer says with an easy, irritatingly melodious laugh as he adjusts his grip on the lever. “No worries, my good man. I don’t go by that handle much, to tell the truth. Friends call me Duke. Three, two—”

Rimmer blinks. “Duke?” he echoes. “What, really?”

The other Rimmer—smegging _Duke_ —lifts his head with a puzzled look of concern. “Something the matter, Ace?”

“They actually call you that,” Rimmer says dubiously.

“Either that or ‘ _hey, you_ ’.” There’s that laugh again, that charming bubble of good-natured fun that makes Rimmer’s fillings hurt. “I’m partial to Duke, and the chaps, here—well, they’ve never known any different. Shall we get this up?”

Rimmer scowls, but hunkers down ready to lift on _three, two, one,_ and together they heave their weight down onto the lever to try and pry the fuselage up. While they strain and hold it still for Lister to work whatever weird magic he’s doing over there, Rimmer mutters, mostly to himself, “I could never get my lot to call me anything cool.”

“What about Ace?” the other Rimmer—Duke—Christ above, _Duke_ —asks.

“Well,” Rimmer hedges awkwardly. “It sort of—I got that one by accident. It’s a long story.”

“Okay, down!” Lister calls across, and it is a relief to both Rimmers to be allowed to release the lever and let the fuselage groan back down again.

“Wait,” Rimmer says, turning to Duke with a frown. “So… is your name not Arnold? Arnie? Before you were Duke, I mean.”

Duke shakes his head, lips pursed. “No. I was—something different.” He claps a hand charmingly to Rimmer’s shoulder. “Duke is fine, though.” He tilts his head over dreamily to peer past Rimmer at where Lister is dragging out another sheet of metal panelling. “How are we looking over there?”

Lister makes a sort of non-committal groaning sound, and Rimmer turns to look.

Duke raises his eyebrows. “That doesn’t sound good.”

“You ready to go again?” Lister calls over, wiping his muddy hands on his boilersuit. “One big push and I reckon I should be able to wedge it up. Careful, though—that strut’ll be just about ready to come sliding out.”

With hands on hips, Duke looks over at Rimmer with a determination that makes Rimmer’s heart sink. “Ready, Ace?”

“Erm.” Rimmer hesitates. “When he says the strut will be ready to—”

“No worries, my good man. We’ll swap sides, and then that way, if anything does happen, it’ll come hurtling perilously in my direction instead of yours.”

Well, if Duke insists, then Rimmer certainly isn’t going to argue.

They change sides of the lever, count down _three, two, one,_ and then bring all their combined strength to bear on lifting the fuselage. It rises, creaking and squelching unpleasantly, out of the mud, and Lister rushes under with another metal panel to force the thruster into the right position. Rimmer grits his teeth and holds his position, and then when Lister asks can they get it just an inch or so higher, just one more shove, he and Duke take deep breaths and push harder—and then there is a harsh scraping noise, a flash of metal, and the broken landing strut snaps back out into place, and Duke doubles over with a grunt.

It happens that fast: push, scrape, and then Duke is almost on his knees, white-faced and gasping. Rimmer’s eyes widen with panic, but at the last second, Duke manages to steady himself, and—more impressively still—he keeps his grip on the lever so that Rimmer isn’t launched through the air like the world’s most useless trebuchet missile.

“Duke?” Lister calls over, worry colouring his voice. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, nothing.” Slowly, Duke straightens up, but he speaks through gritted teeth and Rimmer can see that he has gone very white. Whiter than normal, that is—Carrie Underwood white. “Just—the strut was dislodged. It got me a bit. I’ll be alright.”

Alarmed, Rimmer takes a closer look and regrets it. “Oh, Lord.”

There is a rough laceration through the front of Duke’s shirt, and there is blood. Quite a lot of blood, actually. Rimmer wobbles.

“He’s not alright,” Rimmer manages, blinking hard to clear his vision as it starts greying out at the edges. “He’s—he’s hurt. He’s—bleeding, a bit.”

“What—” Lister vaults the corner of the thruster and he is there in a heartbeat. A hand cups the side of Duke’s face, then finds his shoulder, his side, searching. “Where—oh, smeg. Okay.”

“Honestly, it’s nothing, just a scratch, really,” Duke insists, tilting his head to try and catch Lister’s eye. His expression is gentle, gentler than Rimmer thought his own face was capable of. “Look, I’ll be alright. Let’s get the fuselage clear, and then we can wrangle me some Elastoplast.”

“No way, José.” Lister’s hand lingers on Duke’s ribs as he twists at the waist to find Rimmer. “Hey—Ace, can you hold down the fort while I get him inside? I’ll get Kryten and the Cat down to help you.”

“Erm.” Rimmer was struggling to hold the lever even with Duke’s help, so the idea of being left to hold up the whole bloody ship on his own is daunting to say the least. “Well,” he says, and is just trying to figure out how to say, _absolutely not, you lunatics, I am a hardlight hologram but I’m not Arnold sodding Schwarzenegger and I’m probably going to throw my back out just by looking at it,_ without sounding like a total wimp—and then the decision is no longer his to make.

“Cheers,” Lister says, and he helps Duke to extricate himself from the weight of the ship, and then it is only Rimmer’s grip on the lever wedged underneath the fuselage keeping the whole ship from sinking back into the mud and undoing all their progress so far.

He watches helplessly as Lister wraps an arm carefully around Duke’s waist and helps him around the other side of _Starbug_ to the steps, and Rimmer is left on his own, the mud slowly sucking at his boots. Water is beginning to seep through his laces and drench his socks.

_It’s alright,_ Rimmer tells himself, fingers flexing to try and keep a solid grip on the lever. _It’s okay. Kryten and the Cat will be out soon to help. Everything will be fine._

Then it starts to rain.

_Soon_ , it transpires, is nearly eleven minutes later, when Rimmer is certain that he has pulled every muscle in his body, possibly pulled out one of his fingernails, and is drenched through to the skin. Kryten emerges in bright orange waterproofs, knee-high wellingtons, and a hat that looks as though it has been repurposed from a beekeeping suit. The Cat, beside him, is in a sequined speedo.

“Owww!” the Cat screeches, and he pivots on his toes, striking a dramatic, alarmingly flexible pose which makes Rimmer feel odd and stiff just thinking about it. “I haven’t been this wet since I saw my ass in that mirrored floor.”

“What is required of us, do you think?” Kryten wonders aloud, drumming his fingers idly on his metal sternum. “Mr. Lister did mention that there was someone else out there to help—”

“Yes, please, God, help me!” Rimmer barks, straining under the weight and feeling his fingertips slipping.

Kryten just about jumps out of his panelling, and then peers round to see Rimmer slowly dissolving into the swamp and feeling about as glamorous as a chip shop in Great Yarmouth. “Oh, goodness gracious!” Kryten exclaims, gawping uselessly. “It’s Mr. Duke, only much more waterlogged!”

“He looks like Duke if you built a statue of him entirely out of hair pulled from the drain,” the Cat says. “I’ve seen puppies in RSPCA adverts fished out of rivers who look less bedraggled than this guy.”

“Will you shut up and get over here?!” Rimmer snaps.

Together, they haul the lever up and lift the fuselage free of the mud—Rimmer _does_ warn them about the dangerous metal spike risk, although a petty part of him wants to keep schtum since they were so rude to him—and they finish off working the tracks underneath so that, from there, it’s relatively straightforward for _Starbug_ to haul itself out of the muck.

By this point, Rimmer feels in desperate need of a towel. Kryten and the Cat invite him aboard, and Rimmer stands dripping in the airlock doorway while Kryten hunts down something absorbent for him—and a cup of tea, while he’s at it—and the Cat wrestles with _Starbug’s_ controls to help level out the ship and reduce the risk of them sinking again.

“Where’s the other one likely to be?” Rimmer asks Kryten, taking the towel from him when he returns.

“Do you mean Duke, sir?” Kryten asks. “From the condition he was in, I’d imagine he would probably be in the medical bay. Just up the stairs and on the left.”

Rimmer does know where the medical bay is, but he can’t be arsed to get into that. He scrubs roughly at his hair with the towel—for once, he’s glad he wasn’t wearing the wig—and takes the stairs at a jog, two steps at a time.

Upstairs from the midsection, the ship is quiet but for the hum of power from the backup generators, and mostly dark. Light spills in a neat rectangle from the open doorway to the medical bay at the other end of the corridor, and Rimmer makes a beeline for it.

However, as soon as he goes in, he stops dead, distinctly of the sense that he has intruded on something.

Duke is sat on the edge of the examination table, legs swinging; he has stripped out of his shirt and now sits bare-chested, gleaming with sweat, and exactly as ridiculously handsome and chiselled would be expected from the bastard. He even has a load of cool scars that make him look even tougher and manlier—what looks like a bullet wound in his shoulder, some kind of burn on his upper arm, and two thick dark, horizontal scars cut very symmetrically underneath each pectoral muscle. His hair is artfully curling as he looks down at where Lister is carefully, tenderly stitching up his abdomen wound—so, great, another cool scar for Duke, while Rimmer is stuck with a poxy appendectomy scar and a weird notch on his jaw. Fantastic.

Lister says something to Duke, a murmur too low for Rimmer to hear, and Duke huffs a soft laugh, shaking his head. That laugh is strange and alien—too charming, too cheerful, not weaselly enough—but the way he looks at Lister is very, very familiar.

Rimmer tries to backpedal out of this situation before they notice him, but in the process he accidentally knocks over an IV stand, and so announces his presence with a deafening clatter.

Duke and Lister lift their heads to look over.

“Oh—sorry to interrupt,” Rimmer says awkwardly, fiddling with the corner of his towel. “I just—I wanted to—I thought I’d come and—you know.”

“Of course,” Duke says graciously, and seems to take pity on Rimmer by ignoring all of his inept blathering. “I can’t thank you enough for taking over down there. You really saved all our bacon. We owe you.”

Rimmer shifts his weight from side to side. Instinctively, he wants more than anything to hate Duke—there is so much of Ace in his every movement and mannerism—but it’s difficult to accomplish when he is so relentlessly, unfailingly _nice._

“Well,” Rimmer says stiffly, and makes a vague, non-committal gesture with one hand. “Erm. You—er. You’re welcome. And good to see that you, erm, didn’t die.”

Lister raises his eyebrows.

To his credit, Duke doesn’t react like Rimmer’s an idiot. He just laughs again, that stupid, irritating, charming laugh, and says, “I’m glad of that, too.” He looks over, then, at Lister, and gently chucks him under the chin with his knuckle. “I have this one to thank for that.”

Rimmer’s nose wrinkles and he averts his eyes. “Well, I suppose I’d better be on my way,” he says, slow and plaintive as he is very much fishing for a _no, no, please, stay_.

“Oh, no, you must stay,” Duke protests.

Jackpot.

Duke lifts his arms handsomely while Lister carefully winds bandage around his abdomen to hold a square of thick gauze in place, and barely winces in the process. In the meantime, he meets Rimmer’s eyes and says, “Will you stay for a cup of something strong and bracing? Go on, Ace—you’ll break my heart.”

“Oh, alright,” Rimmer relents, as though it’s such a hardship, and he hovers awkwardly nearby like a spare part while Lister finishes cleaning Duke up, and then they head downstairs together—Lister, crusted from head to toe in mud, although admittedly for him that is his natural element; Duke, shirtless and stoic like a five-foot-five Hercules; Rimmer, sodden and bedraggled.

Down the midsection, Kryten is already pottering about with a mop after all the long smears of mud across the floor, but apparently not before having set out drinks. There on the table, thank God, is a pot of tea and a plate of Jammy Dodgers, but instead Duke swaggers charmingly towards a low wooden case, where he pulls out a bottle of dark liquor which turns Rimmer’s stomach just looking at it.

“Oh, erm.” Rimmer hesitates. He doesn’t want to seem a wimp but the idea of drinking what looks like petrol makes him think he might genuinely ill. “Well—I—actually—”

“I’m having mine with grenadine and half a tub of little maraschino cherries, if that makes any difference to you.” Duke gives a wink. “We deserve it, eh?”

Rimmer relaxes somewhat. “Oh. Well, I—alright, then.”

Duke nods and passes across a glass, sloshing perilously. “Happy accident, then,” he says. “Salut.”

Rimmer spares a longing glance at the pot of tea, but lifts his glass, clinks, and then carefully sips at something which tastes like it’s been siphoned from the belly of an old tractor. He splutters, chokes, and spits half his mouthful back—discreetly, or so he thinks until he looks over to see Lister grinning at him.

In a panic, Rimmer starts to fumble for an excuse, but before he can say anything, Lister reaches over while Duke’s back is turned to speak to Kryten, takes Rimmer’s glass, empties it into his own, and then slides it back with a wink.

For a moment, Rimmer is dumbfounded, blinking. Then Duke turns back round and remarks, “You’ve put that away quickly, Ace!”

Rimmer pulls himself together enough to say manfully, “Yes! Delicious! Thank you.”

Lister hides his grin behind his fist.

Duke uncaps the decanter. “Another?”

“No!” Rimmer bursts out, somewhat more violently than required, and lunges to cover his glass with such urgency that he nearly smacks it off the table. “No,” he says again, more calmly and less like a maniac. “Thanks—I’m, er, driving.”

Lister stifles a snort.

“Of course—terribly rude of me, old chap. I can only apologise,” Duke says, and Rimmer offers a glib smile.

It’s a testament to Duke, really, that he’s laughing and joking and drinking rum straight barely half an hour after he was nearly impaled; Rimmer feels much less chirpy, and all he got out of it was a blister. As loath as Rimmer might be to admit, Duke isn’t a thousand miles away from another equally unbearable, cheery, rugged alternate Rimmer that currently haunts his every waking moment.

In theory, this is the perfect solution to all Rimmer’s problems—and yet, he thinks, as he watches alternate universe _Dwarfers_ settling in for the evening after a hard day’s work, something gives him pause. Lister’s hand on Duke’s waist to steady him when he stands up to help Kryten bring in a tray laden with biscuits and sandwiches. The soft smile on Duke’s lips when he looks over, grateful, and murmurs, _cheers, love._ The thumb bumping over Lister’s knuckles when Duke takes his hand so he can ease back into his seat afterwards.

Rimmer doesn’t know if he can do this.

“Penny for your thoughts, Ace?”

Rimmer startles, and he looks up to find Duke looking at him with—ugh—sympathy and compassion. It’s nauseating. Worse still, he offers a smile, and Rimmer doesn’t like it one bit. In spite of all this, he says, “Nothing. I just—it’s complicated. I have to jump between dimensions looking for different Rimmers—for one particular, Rimmer, really, but—who knows? You could well be the answer to my prayers.”

Duke winks. “Depends what you’ve been praying for.”

Rimmer’s nose wrinkles. Again.

At that moment, the Cat swings in from the cockpit—mercifully more clothed than the last time Rimmer saw him, although not by much, his sequined speedo now covered by an elaborately embroidered red kaftan.

“Phew!” the Cat exclaims, mopping artfully at his brow with the corner of his kaftan, and the process flashing the speedo at everyone again, which makes Rimmer flinch. “What a nightmare!”

“Oh no, sir,” Kryten says fearfully. “What’s the matter? Were you not able to successfully recalibrate the fuel sensors?”

The Cat shakes his head with a grimace. “Worse. Much worse,” he says. “The antenna must’ve got busted in the landing. The radio ain’t picking up anything other than Absolute Country.”

Lister shakes his head with a laugh, and as the Cat muscles his way into the space between him and Duke, Rimmer finds an excuse to slip away—needing to powder his hair, or he left the ironing board on, or he has to feed his pet rock, or something. He says he’ll be right back and he lets himself out through the airlock door and down the stairs into the swamp again.

When he reaches the bottom of the steps, he finds that the rain has not eased off at all, but seems only to have intensified out of spite. He picks his way slowly, agonisingly, across mud and fallen logs and lichen, until he reaches _Wildfire_ , which for once seems like a haven instead of a metal mausoleum.

He flops heavily into the pilot’s seat, waits until the cockpit door has closed behind him, and says, “Molly.”

She _bleeps_ onto the screen looking annoyed and faintly rumpled, as though she might have been sleeping, or downloading updates. “Alright, Lance Armstrong?”

Rimmer opts to ignore this. “I have an ethical dilemma. I’ve found the perfect Rimmer. He’s very like Ace.”

“No shit, Sherlock. You’ve all got the same DNA.”

“No—I mean, in his character,” Rimmer snaps. “His attitude to things.”

Molly raises her eyebrows. “Wow. Well done. There’s your problem solved, then.”

“Yes.” Rimmer gives a curt nod. He drums his fingertips awkwardly on his arm-rest while he considers how to explain the tricky part. He says irritably, “And he’s in love with Lister. _Again_.”

“Ah.” Molly grimaces. “You don’t know if it’s fair to lure him away into deep space.”

“What?” Rimmer recoils. “No, of course I’m going to lure him away into deep space. So what if he’s in love with Lister? _I’m_ in love with him and I had to just suck it up and get on—so can he.”

Molly pulls a face but doesn’t argue.

“No, my issue is that he’s… alive,” Rimmer says, in the same tone of voice that someone on the council of a quaint Shropshire village might describe a busload of tourists as being _American._ “I mean, if I had a dollarpound for every time I got myself into a pickle I barely survived as a hardlight hologram, I’d be able to rent in Kensington. Alive—he won’t last a week.”

“Smegging hell, Arnold,” Molly says. “Are you… _worried_ about him?”

“No,” Rimmer objects. “No! Of course not. I’m not worried about that jumped-up prat. He can take a long walk off a short ledge for all I care. I just—I just think it’s not sustainable. Very un-environmentally friendly to get through Aces that fast. Think of the carbon footprint! No, no, I just—I think that perhaps—well.” He tips his head back against the seat and tries again. “What I wanted to know is whether I should tell him that the Ace gig is a one-way trip. Or if I should say that he can pack it in, too, when he gets sick of it.”

Molly says nothing.

Thinking she might perhaps not have understood, Rimmer clarifies, “Whether I, er, change the legacy, so to speak.”

There is a further beat in which there is only silence, and Molly just looks at him, seemingly startled speechless. Then, after whatever internal struggle she is facing, she says, “That’s… a really good idea, actually.”

Rimmer retorts, “Why—what’s wrong with it?!”

Molly frowns. “I said it’s a _good_ idea, you useless donkey.”

“Oh.” The very concept of having had a good idea is, truthfully, quite novel to Rimmer. He hesitates. “Thank you?”

Molly rolls her eyes, but then regards him with an expression which is not exactly contempt, and so is initially difficult for Rimmer to read. “So will you ask him?”

Rimmer puffs his cheeks out in a long, overdrawn sigh. “Suppose I’d better had do.”

He says this, and then doesn’t move.

“Any day now, Arnold,” Molly prompts him brusquely.

“I know, I’m going, I’m going,” Rimmer snaps, and doesn’t.

A pregnant pause ensues. Rimmer twiddles his thumbs. He clicks his tongue. He bounces his knee.

“D’you need me to fire you out the ejector seat, or—”

“What if he still says no?” Rimmer says. “The likeliest of the lot we’ve seen in the last hundred dimensions, ready for action, without the pressure of having to die in the line of duty—but what will I do if he still says no?”

“Then you’d go on looking,” Molly says, and Rimmer groans and slams his head against the steering column.

In the end, it’s nowhere near as bad as Rimmer feared. When he finally summons the iota of courage required to speak to Duke frankly about the matter, it’s a very productive conversation.

“What do you mean by a hero?” Duke asks, at first, with a perplexed frown, and so Rimmer has to explain—saving the world, kissing babies, altering the course of human history, etc, etc, etc.

“Most of the time, you just jump aimlessly between dimensions searching for trouble,” Rimmer explains, with a shrug so calculatedly nonchalant that he thinks he pulls a muscle in his neck. “Every now and then you’ll be received and celebrated somewhere for your achievements, which is nice… nowhere to cash in the giant novelty cheque, though, which is a chore. But sometimes they make statues of you. Saint Arnold defeating the death worm, and so on—that’s rather good.”

Duke’s eyes widen. “Golly,” he says, tone reverential. “That sounds stupendous.”

“It is, it’s terrific,” Rimmer replies, and starts to wonder if he’s mad to throw this all away. “You feel like a rock-star. You feel like a god. Medals beyond reckoning, buildings named after you, the dawning of a Golden Age of peace and prosperity brought about solely by yours truly…”

His voice trails off wistfully and he loses track of what he was trying to say.

“Then why give it up?” Duke asks tentatively.

Rimmer takes a deep breath. “I want to go home,” he confesses, the words coming out in a low rush, as if his homesickness is something shameful.

“How long has it been?”

“I have no idea,” Rimmer admits. “Years.” Just saying it out loud makes him feel worse, and he ducks his head against the sudden sting at the back of his eyes, the crowding in his throat. Smeg.

“I’ll do it,” Duke says.

Rimmer lifts his head, surprised.

“Seems only fair, eh, old chap?” Duke says chivalrously. “I’d be honoured to do it.”

For a moment, Rimmer doesn’t know what to say. The half-tilt of a smile that finally reaches his face is watery, and what he says, of all things, is, “Molly’s going to like you.”

***

Molly does like him—Rimmer can tell, because when he introduces them, she calls Duke a jumped-up twerp but not with the disdain that Rimmer is accustomed to—and they agree to set an autopilot course to return for the new Ace once Rimmer has been dropped off at home.

Suddenly it’s all actually happening. A few days ago, this was a pipe dream, and Rimmer was starting to think it was impossible, that he was going to die in this stupid gold flight-suit—and now it’s all really, actually, properly happening, sooner and more dramatically than he had expected.

He doesn’t know what to do now. He doesn’t what to _think_. Should he… bring something? A nice rosé wine, perhaps? A fruit basket? A bouquet of fragrant candles? He shakes himself. Snap out of it.

To tell the truth, he doesn’t really have any affairs to wrap up. No loose ends to tie, no belongings even really to pack. No clothes, even. Initially, he had sort of just materialised into this flight suit and has been living in it ever since, and so he can’t very well pack that up for the next one. All he needs to leave behind for the next Ace is the wig, but he’s sick of all the extra hair, anyway.

This will also mark the first time that he has used the upgraded dimension drive to jump to a specific universe rather than just pressing the big red button and hoping for the best. He isn’t entirely convinced that it’s going to work; to be honest, he isn’t convinced that it isn’t going to just explode and kill him anyway. Normally, the mere, tiniest iota of fear that something might even give him a papercut would be more than enough to make him keep a wide berth, but he’s so close to coming home he can almost taste it: sweet at first, and then incrementally more unpleasant as it becomes nauseatingly cloying with the fear that _oh God, have I done the wrong thing? Have I made a terrible mistake?_ –like a Percy Pig.

Needless to say, Rimmer is bricking it.

There is nothing for it, really. He has done all that needs to be done. He’s set up _Wildfire_ for the scheduled autopilot return to Duke’s dimension, cleared his books and his journal and his toothbrush out of the back compartment, and keyed in the coordinates for hopping to Dimension 127.

Well—he’s keyed it in, but he hasn’t actually set the jump in motion. He just sort of left it to sit there on the screen, letting the coordinates breathe like a vintage wine, or an over-full laundry basket.

Rimmer’s logic is this: if he sets off for Dimension 127, then the odds are that he will actually end up there, and he’ll have to do something, like see Lister again and face how Lister feels about him and if he really, seriously intended to break up with him when he sent Rimmer out into the wasteland of deepest space, and if Lister doesn’t love him anymore, then that’s something he’ll just have to deal with all on his tod, without any sort of backup plan— _whereas_ … whereas if he _doesn’t_ set off for Dimension 127, then he can keep daydreaming about seeing Lister again and how great it would hypothetically be to kiss him and hold his hand and suck him off, etcetera, etcetera, without worrying about whether the reality of it comes up short.

It’s a winning argument, really. Here Rimmer is, everything all lined up and ready, and doing nothing about it.

Upgraded dimension drive to get home? Check. Coordinates for his home dimension? Check. Replacement Ace Rimmer? Check. Willpower to actually push the smegging button?

Rimmer looks at the little red light on the dashboard, watches it blink over his steepled fingers, and does nothing.

He has been Ace for so long now that he can’t remember what being Rimmer is like. He knows he was weaselly, useless, generally despised. He knows he was a smeghead. Does he want to live like that again? More to the point, will the crew of _Red Dwarf_ —will Lister—want that back?

“Awfully quiet, Arnold,” Molly comments, voice gentler than he’s used to, and for some reason that just hammers home how terrifyingly real this is.

“Just—” Rimmer hesitates. “Getting a hang of the character.”

He chews at a hangnail and stares at the dimension drive. His pulse is beating in his ears.

“You sure about this?” Molly checks. “If you’re not ready, we can always—”

“No, I’m ready,” Rimmer says firmly.

Molly sighs. “Well, can’t blame a girl for trying.”

Rimmer cuts a sharp, disbelieving look at the screen. “I would have thought you’d be glad to be shot of me.”

“Oh, I am, don’t worry,” Molly says mildly. “I just can’t be arsed to go through the faff of training up a new Ace, that’s all. God, d’you remember how long it took you to get the hang of it? And you were actually pretty quick on the uptake—some of the ones I’ve had have been a few potatoes shy of a pasty, if you catch my drift.”

Rimmer grimaces.

“Look, all I’m saying is you don’t have to go now if you don’t want to,” Molly says. “I mean, you’re a hologram. You live forever, more or less. You’ve got another couple of centuries left in you at least—”

Rimmer punches the button.

“Smegging hell, alright,” Molly says.

He has just about enough time to close the visor of his helmet before anything kicks into action, and then he feels _Wildfire_ ’s acceleration slam him back into his seat, the wormhole unfurls before the nose, and then they go hurtling through it.

When they come out on the wormhole’s far side, a week or a decade or three minutes later, nothing seems particularly out of ordinary. It’s a dimension jump like any other, as far as Rimmer can tell from appearances, and there in the distance is _Red Dwarf_.

The hulking shape seems somehow infinitely more daunting now than the hundreds of times that Rimmer has approached it before, in so many other worlds and lifetimes—now he is frozen, watching _Wildfire’s_ pre-programmed course taking them inexorably closer. He doesn’t know what waits for him on that ship. Sure, for him it’s been about a handful of years, but there’s no telling how long it’s been for them onboard _Red Dwarf_.

As they decelerate and fly in closer, Rimmer removes the helmet. He tucks it under the seat and runs a hand over his hair. He tucks the wig safely into the glove compartment. He checks his breath in the cupped palm of his hand.

“Well, here we go,” Molly says calmly. “You ready for the cycle of your life?”

Rimmer doesn’t dignify this with a response, partly because he is tired of the bicycle jokes, and partly because he is too busy trying hard not to be sick. He doesn’t have anything that can double as a sick bag to hand, except perhaps his helmet, but welcoming Duke to Ace-dom with a helmet full of vomit seems a rather inauspicious start, even by Rimmer’s standards.

By this point, they are coming definitively in to land in the hangar—too late to turn back now. Slowly, Rimmer guides them in, touches down, engines flaring briefly and then cutting out. Rimmer peers out through the fogged window for sight of any sort of landing party or welcome banner, but… nothing.

“Do you think they didn’t recognise me?” Rimmer worries, gnawing on his lower lip. “Should I—I dunno, put my hazards on?”

Molly considers this. “Give a little beep? Or—and I know this is controversial—but you could always just get out and have a smegging look.”

“Alright, alright.”

Rimmer puts his hand on the door handle, and then gets no further. His pulse is drumming high in his throat. His mouth is dry. It’s not that difficult, in theory, to just open the door and get out and go home, but now that he’s here and it’s happening it seems somehow impossible.

“Arnold?” Molly prompts, and for what is probably the first time ever, her voice is gentle. “You alright?”

“I’m fine,” Rimmer says. “I’m fine. This is fine.” He takes a deep breath. “I don’t even know how long it’s been.”

“Well, if you get out and everyone’s reduced to maggots, then you can probably take it that you’re a bit late.”

Strangely enough, Rimmer does not find this enormously comforting. He swallows. “I’m just going to go for it.”

“Are you?” Molly asks. “Or are you actually going to sit here bricking it until we both decompose?”

Out of pure spite, Rimmer pops open the cockpit door. “There,” he says acidly. “Didn’t think I’d do that, did you? Well, I did. I’m doing it. I’m going.”

The corner of Molly’s mouth lifts into a faint half-smile. “Yeah, alright. Go on, then.”

Rimmer checks the wig is secure in the glove compartment, smooths a hand over the front of his flight-suit, and then, with another deep breath, pushes himself up out of his seat.

“Hey—” Molly says, just as he is ducking his head to climb out, and he pauses, twisting at the waist to look back. On the screen, Molly’s expression is as flat and disinterested as ever, apathy verging on contempt, and she arches one eyebrow at him as she says, “Knock ‘em dead, Ace.’”

Rimmer’s mouth falls open. “You—”

“And good luck,” she adds, before he can say anything. “You’ll need it. Now get out of my sodding ship.”

With a short nod, Rimmer climbs out of the cockpit and drops down inelegantly onto the floor of _Red Dwarf’_ s hangar—and then recoils when he sees the Cat standing less than a foot from him, clad in sparkling green velvet and bristling with indignant suspicion.

“Oh, Christ,” Rimmer says. “I wasn’t expecting you to be the first one I saw. Er, good boy. Pss-pss-pss.”

The Cat frowns. “Oh—you.”

“Thank you for the warm welcome,” Rimmer says sarcastically. “Sod the trumpet fanfare, eh? I’ll see myself in.”

“Hey, man, it’s just been a while,” the Cat says, and steps back. He straightens his lapels, brushing the front of his rhinestoned suit as though he has somehow soiled his outfit even by proximity. “Years even since we had you here, Ace.”

_Oh—no,_ Rimmer wants to say. _I’m Rimmer._

“I mean—yes,” he starts tentatively. “But also, no—I’m just—just Rimmer.”

“You were more fashionable last time,” the Cat accuses.

“Well.” Rimmer can’t argue with that, really. “That’s because I’m—I’m not really Ace. I’m just Rimmer. Boring regular old Arnold Rimmer. The original one.”

If the Cat cares or is even listening, he does a superb job at hiding it. He carries on scribbling, and then after a moment flips his sheet of paper and reveals that actually, all he’s been doing on the sodding clipboard is doodling tiny heart-eyed cat ladies swooning, with little speech bubbles that say things like ‘DREAMBOAT’. “Just a couple official questions I gotta go through before I can let you in, bud,” the Cat says. “First: carmine satin crepe or oxblood velvet?”

Rimmer stares. “What?”

The Cat holds up two swatches of fabric.

“I have no idea,” Rimmer says. “They’re both red.”

“Both red—” the Cat looks as though he is barely restraining himself from violence. “This one is carmine, and this one is oxblood.” He shows them individually, and Rimmer immediately forgets which is which. “Pick one.”

“This is pointless—look, you stupid moggy, I don’t care about your stupid fabric swatches,” Rimmer says, feeling his temper flare. “I’m not dicking about choosing your next tuxedo lining, alright? Just let me in. Get someone with the authority to give me the all-clear—get me Lister, for God’s sake.”

Lister. God, _Lister_. He’s here somewhere. Rimmer’s heart squeezes behind his sternum like an over-wrung lemon. He tries hard not to think about it too much.

The Cat screeches a hysterical laugh. “You think Lister has the all-clear? You think that gerbil-faced disaster has the authority—he knows nothing about nothing,” he declares, and while it is a sentiment that usually Rimmer would heartily agree with, on this occasion, Rimmer would like nothing quite so much as to smack the Cat decisively in his oversized, pointed teeth. “And clearly you know less than nothing about nothing, if you think anything about that nothing will make you something worth letting in!”

Christ, Rimmer can’t believe he actually forgot how monumentally, colossally, mind-boggling irritating the Cat could be at close quarters. “Well, you’re not clearly in smegging charge, are you?” he snaps. “You couldn’t pour water out of a shoe if the instructions were on the heel. Now, will you just go get Lister?”

“If anything, calling for Lister’s help makes me less likely to give you any kind of clearance,” the Cat crows. “What else you got, buddy—the serial killer’s handguide? The cannibal cookbook?”

“Will you just shut up and get Lister, please?” Rimmer grits out. “Just get him down here and tell him—I don’t know, tell him—”

“Tell him what?” Lister says.

“—that I’m here, for a start!” Rimmer finishes crossly, and looks over at him, and then realises.

Oh, smeg.

There he is.

This Lister is so instantly, immediately, recognisably _right_ that for a moment Rimmer can say nothing, just drinking in the sight of him.

His boots are unlaced. His boilersuit fits more snugly to his frame than it used to, his hands in his pockets. He wears the scruff of a few days, overdue for a shave. His locs are longer. The slope of his shoulders is gentler, the line of his mouth softer, and he meets Rimmer’s eyes only for a split second before he looks away again, and Rimmer is left once more adrift.

“Lister,” he says, and doesn’t manage anything else, too disarmed by the bright sting at the back of his eyes.

“Hey,” Lister says, and spares him a glance that lasts less time than Rimmer’s most recent relationship with a woman. “Everything okay?”

Rimmer isn’t sure who is being addressed there. He splits a look between Lister and the other Rimmer, and when no answer seems forthcoming on any other front, Rimmer volunteers, “Yes, everything is fine. I just thought I’d—er. See how everyone is, as it were.”

Lister looks up as though taking the measure of the hangar, searching for damage or necessary maintenance. “Seems in pretty good working order to me,” he says, and then shrugs. “Well, you’re the expert, I s’pose.”

This takes Rimmer by surprise. He doesn’t think Lister has ever referred to him as being an expert in anything, except perhaps at avoiding paying people back. “Oh—well. Yes.” Rimmer doesn’t know why he is floundering so badly. He scratches nervously at the back of his neck, mostly for something to do with his hands. “So, erm. Can I come in?” he asks.

Lister toes at the floor with one boot. “Yeah, why not?” he says, sounding not exactly unwelcoming, but somewhat unenthused, maybe. “Might as well have a look. I should warn you, not much is going on at the minute—we were more or less winding down for the night when the scanner went off.”

“Oh, that’s alright,” Rimmer says eagerly. “Anything is fine.”

Lister makes a non-committal sort of grunting sound and nods. “You sure? We can always take a look round in the morning. I think the ship’ll survive ‘til then.”

It's not an overwhelmingly enthusiastic response; in fact, Rimmer is feeling distinctly whelmed. He doesn't know what he thought would happen when he saw Lister again, but he thought he might at least seem somewhat pleased. Rimmer doesn't argue, however; he just nods. “Oh, yes—that would be fine. More than fine, in fact.”

For a moment, Lister is silent, just standing there, hands in his pockets. “Yeah, alright. Come on in.” With that, Lister turns and walks away into _Red Dwarf_ —not waiting to see whether Rimmer will follow. For a moment, Rimmer hesitates, but then Lister pauses in the distant doorway and looks back, eyebrows raised. “What’re you waiting for, a gift basket? Let’s go.”

Flushing with embarrassed heat, Rimmer chases hurriedly after him down the corridor. He tries to keep up, to talk to him properly, but Lister is moving with alarming purpose and speed, and before Rimmer can catch up with him, he is waylaid.

The Cat falls into step with him, peering at him suspiciously. “Hey, what happened to your hair?”

Rimmer frowns. “What about it?”

“It’s short and ugly,” the Cat says bluntly.

“Oh. Well.” Rimmer isn’t sure what to say to that. His face scrunches up disdainfully. “I mean, it was a wig.”

“No way!” the Cat seems appalled by this, and he calls ahead to Lister. “Hey—you hearing this? I knew ol’ Goalpost Head looked like a Brillopad with ears, but I thought he got an upgrade.”

Rimmer gives a tight, blank smile. “Afraid not.”

Lister only glances half-back over his shoulder. “Leave it alone, Cat, man.”

This seems like the first sign of encouragement, and so Rimmer takes heart from it and hastens to catch up with Lister. “So, erm,” he says, clearing his throat awkwardly. “How on Io did you get _Red Dwarf_ back?” Rimmer asks as he follows Lister up. “Last time I was here, you’d lost it.”

“Oh, yeah,” Lister says with a dismissive flap of the hand. “Long story.”

“I’ve got time,” Rimmer says anxiously, trying to fall into step alongside him.

Lister glances over, a split-second look that measures Rimmer and comes to some inscrutable conclusion that Rimmer is not privy to. Then he rattles off at high speed, “Tiny nano robots rebuilt the ship along with the entire crew—with no idea that they’d all died, by the way—then a load of different mishaps, like a big dinosaur, an oracle who was kind of a cow, getting chucked in prison, a flesh-eating virus that took over the ship—so they all evacuated, leaving us alone to wrangle the ship when everything got restored.”

Somehow, this information raises more questions than it answers. Rimmer decides that perhaps right now is not the time.

“No idea what came of the others,” Lister goes on, in a kind of flat, mostly disinterested voice. They pause at the lifts and wait while Lister jabs the up button. “We did try to track them down for a while, but we lost ‘em. Deep space is pretty big, you know.”

“And now you’re…”

“Just floating aimlessly forever,” Lister says. “Same as usual.”

Rimmer inclines his head slightly in an awkward half-nod and finds he isn’t sure what to say to that.

The lift doors ping open. Rimmer, Lister, and the Cat head inside, and the doors shut behind them, and Rimmer still doesn’t know how to answer. He rocks nervously on the balls of his feet, and says, “Indeed.”

To tell the truth, Rimmer is struggling to think of anything to say at all—something which has never been the case between him and Lister, not even when they were on Z-Shift together and hated each other’s guts. The more he thinks about how unusually silent they are, the more stifling and claustrophobic the silence seems, and the more he internally panics about how stifling and claustrophobic the silence is, the more utterly blank his mind goes as he scrambles for a conversation starter.

He opens his mouth and then closes it again.

_Is Kryten still very square?_

_What did you have for lunch today?_

_How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?_

_Do you still love me?_

Rimmer swallows. He twists his fingers together. He bounces his foot agitatedly until both the Cat and Lister turn to look at him with mild annoyance, and he stops. He starts to say sorry, but finds he doesn’t have the voice for it, instead making a funny sort of croak, and before he can clear his throat and try again, the lift clunks into place with an ominous shudder that makes Lister flinch.

_B-deck_ , a calm, plummy female voice states. _Habitation_.

Lister jabs at the open-door button, once, then again with increased aggression, and then over and over until the doors groan open. He leads the way out, rolling his shoulders as though to shake off the discomfort of the enclosed space, and Rimmer wants to say something but has no idea what.

_You’re still claustrophobic, then?_

_It’s alright—you survived the lift!_

_Here we are! We made it! You didn’t die in a blazing inferno at the bottom of the lift shaft!_

As they come out into the narrow grey corridors of B-deck, the floor is shining and damp, and a glance along towards the officers’ quarters reveals the cause—Kryten, mop in hand, merrily whistling the theme song from the _Autoglass_ advert.

“Hey, you missed a spot,” the Cat calls, and cackles a maniacal laugh when Kryten’s head whips up in dismay.

“He’s having you on, Kryten, man,” Lister says, straight on the path of derailing whatever meltdown the Cat might have triggered. “Floor’s fine.” He pauses, and then he jerks his head over towards Rimmer. “Look who we found.”

Kryten looks across and does a quintuple take, his eyes boggling from his latex skull. “Ace!” he exclaims, and he blinks several times in rapid succession with a funny whirring sound. “And—sir, correct me if I’m wrong, but you’re a hologram!”

“Afraid so,” Rimmer says. “Lots of different universes, lots of different exciting inventions, but they haven’t quite cured death yet, unfortunately.”

Kryten reels, wielding the mop wildly. “Sir, your voice!”

Rimmer frowns. “What?”

“It sounds much more nasal and whiney, sir.”

“This is my voice,” Rimmer says, only just a touch defensive. “You really thought I'd keep the other one? No, I dropped it after a while. It was getting on my nerves a bit.”

“It’s incredible,” Kryten marvels, marching lumpily closer. “It’s as though no time has passed! You sound just like the Arnold Rimmer we knew and—well.” He pauses with wide-eyed alarm and shuffles awkwardly. He glances at Lister, seemingly apologetic. “Knew.”

“Thanks, Kryten,” Lister says.

Rimmer cannot shake the feeling that he is missing something here.

“Well,” he says, and then forgets what he had planned to say. His leg is jiggling anxiously again and he _knows_ it’s annoying, but it also makes him feel marginally less like he is going to be sick.

“We’re gonna have a proper little get-together in the morning,” Lister says. “Get our heads down first.”

“A most salient suggestion, sir,” Kryten says. “Will you want anything to eat, Ace?”

Rimmer is thrown for a moment, so unprepared to hear _Ace_ from Kryten’s mouth and have it mean _him._ “What? No—and honestly, Rimmer is fine, it feels strange to call me—”

“No, you’re alright,” Lister says.

Rimmer glances over but Lister is not looking at him.

“I could eat,” the Cat says.

“I know you could eat,” Kryten tells the Cat. “You could attend a ten-course Viking banquet and ask for seconds. I was asking Mr. Ace—”

“No, no, I feel—honestly too nervous,” Rimmer says with a slightly hysterical bubble of laughter. “Which seems ridiculous, I know but—no, I couldn’t—no.”

“In that case, why don’t you head in for the night and—"

“And get a snack for me?” the Cat chips in eagerly.

“Yes, Mr. Cat,” Kryten sighs. He gives an inelegant sort of bow in the direction of Lister and Rimmer. “I’ll catch up with you tomorrow, then, sirs. I can’t wait to hear all your exciting stories!”

Rimmer isn’t sure how to feel about the fact that Kryten, of all smegging people, rubber-headed Jeeves, is the first person to actually seem pleased to see him. It seems unfathomable… no, it seems downright ludicrous. He hates this.

“Right, well.” Lister wheels round on his heel and tilts his head in the direction of the far corridor. “I’m gonna just… head off to bed, then.”

“Oh,” Rimmer says hastily, foreseeing in a flash that this is perfect—a chance to get him alone! “Me too! I’ll come.”

Lister looks at him, a perplexed crease to his brow, but he says nothing. He turns and heads down the hallway, leaving Rimmer hurrying to catch up to him.

“Lister,” Rimmer says, and he is so nervous that he can feel his words all bottlenecking in his throat, his tongue tangled and useless so that he struggles to string together a single coherent sentence. “Finally—we—a chance to—to—well. There’s so much to say, isn’t there?”

For all appearances, Lister is not listening. As he walks, he is focused on picking gunk of his eyelashes. “Yeah,” he says. “Look—maybe later.”

“Oh. No, yes, of course, I understand. Erm—but if I could just—”

“Is it urgent?” Lister interrupts tiredly, and stops dead in the middle of the hall, bracing a hand against the wall.

“Er,” Rimmer says, and he doesn’t know the answer to that. It’s not exactly breaking news, that he loves him. Then again, he also hasn’t spoken to Lister in literal years; surely, it wouldn’t be too much to assume that it might be nice for them to catch up, have a chinwag, talk about all the cool things that Rimmer has been doing since he jetted off handsomely into a nearby wormhole.

“That’s a no,” Lister says flatly. He drums his fingers against the wall and doesn’t look right at Rimmer. “It can wait ‘til morning. I’m knackered, man. Save it for now.”

Rimmer looks over at where Lister leans on the wall, and he realises that Lister is actually leaning on a door panel, which has just activated to slide open a door to one of the old officers’ quarters. Inside, the lights are harsh and white, the bed neatly starched and ironed, a towel folded at the foot of the mattress.

Stupidly, his first thought is that Lister has got a lot tidier since he was last here.

“Should all be pretty well furnished and set-up in there,” Lister says, and pushes himself off the wall. He pushes his hands back into the pockets of his boilersuit and kicks distractedly at his own shoelace where it trails between his boots. “There’s an intercom just by the door, so give Kryten a shout if you need anything. Or—I’m only down the hall, but I mean, Kryten is probably the better bet.”

“Oh,” Rimmer says. “Right. Of course.”

He is an idiot.

All the tension in his body abruptly sags and loosens. He doesn’t know what he expected. He doesn’t know why he expected anything, to be honest. He hasn’t seen Lister in years, and he shows up unannounced, expecting to be welcomed back with open arms and open legs? What a complete and utter and total prat.

Lister must hear something in his voice because he looks up and—for what feels like the first time since Rimmer landed—meets his eyes. “What?”

“Nothing,” Rimmer says haltingly. “Nothing, I just—I thought—it doesn’t matter.”

The way Lister looks at him now doesn’t feel much like the way Rimmer has been imagining it for years. There’s no warmth, no humour in it, and it lasts about three seconds before Lister looks away again. “Yeah,” he says, in a tone which is not unkind but brooks no argument. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

Well. That’s that, then.

Without another word, Lister turns and continues on his way towards his own room, and Rimmer lingers in the corridor to watch him go, as though waiting for something to change, for Lister to come back— _only joking, man, come on, smeghead, come here_ —and invite him in and wrap him up in his arms or, or, or, or _something._

Nothing changes.

His throat has closed off and the anxiety in the pit of his belly has tightened to a cold sort of nausea and his chest hurts like he’s been kicked by a horse. Above all else, he is seized by the irrational terror that if he doesn’t say something now, he never will, and this will all be over before it even gets a chance to start. He will lose him forever, all over again.

“Lister,” Rimmer bursts out, before he chickens out completely.

There are a few steps where it briefly appears as though Lister hasn’t heard him, or is pretending not to, and that he’ll just keep walking—and then gradually, Lister slows and stops, shoulders pulling tense. He half-turns and looks back.

Rimmer almost didn’t believe he’d get this far. He has no idea what he wants to say. His heart squeezes behind his ribs and his throat feels raw. There is a very real possibility that he is going to cry or throw up or both, and he is just staring down the corridor at Lister, who looks back at him with tired impatience in his every muscle.

Lister says bluntly, “What?”

“It’s good to see you again,” Rimmer manages at last, his voice strained.

The tension loosens in Lister’s body, his shoulders sagging. He is too far down the corridor for Rimmer to read his face. Quietly, he says, “Yeah,” which is not quite the answer that Rimmer was looking for, and then he turns away again and disappears into his own room.

Even then, Rimmer stands in the corridor a while longer, waiting for something to happen, waiting for the sliding door to open again, for Lister to change his mind.

The door remains closed.

***


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Heads up, this chapter is where the fic earns its rating. Also, I know I said that this fic can be a standalone from Easy As Anything as long as you go in with the understanding that Rimmer and Lister were in an established relationship, but there will be a couple of references that might otherwise prove a little confusing. Soz.

**CHAPTER SEVEN**

Naively, Rimmer had thought that being Ace—death-defying odds, perils at every turn, missing Lister desperately for every second of every godforsaken day, across thousands of alternate dimensions—would be as bad as it got.

He was wrong.

No, much worse is missing him desperately from the other end of the hallway, from across the room.

The whole thing has thrown Rimmer right off his stride. He feels as though he hasn’t come home at all, but has just been stranded in yet another poxy, subpar universe. He doesn’t feel like himself. This doesn’t feel like home. He starts to worry—what if this isn’t the right universe after all? How sure can he be that it wasn’t actually 126 or 128 or 172 or another number altogether which has escaped his brain? Now he’s here and he’s trapped with no way of getting back. He doesn’t know which idea is worse: that he’s in the wrong reality and doomed to stay here forever with this pleasantly aloof Lister, or that he’s in the right reality and Lister just wishes he hadn’t come back.

After a long, excruciating, sleepless night in which Rimmer re-evaluates every choice he’s ever made, morning arrives with a headache and a dry mouth and an awful gnawing pit in his stomach. It’s not entirely to do with the fact that he skipped dinner.

Breakfast is an awkward affair. In the past, they’d normally eat at the table in the bunk room, but instead Kryten has set up in Parrots’, making things strangely formal. Kryten is handing out nicely laundered napkins; the Cat, in hair rollers and a green face mask, is tying string round the ends of his bacon rashers to make them wiggle; Lister is nowhere to be seen.

“Where’s Lister?” Rimmer asks, as casually as possible.

“I’m not sure, sir—the idea of him skipping breakfast is unlikelier than a dog learning a card trick, or a Westlife comeback,” Kryten says, shaking his head. “Especially when I so lovingly poured the extra bacon grease into his mug for a cup of so-called Heart Attack Coffee.”

Rimmer’s lip curls.

“Not to worry, sir,” Kryten says cheerfully. “I don’t imagine he’ll be long. True, sometimes he sleeps in so late that I have to rotate him in his sheets like a battered sausage to keep him from getting bedsores, but usually the smell of cooking bacon will usually bring him running.”

“That’s assuming he can smell anything,” the Cat points out. “If he could smell anything other than his own armpits, I would be astounded.”

“The more things change, the more they stay the same,” Rimmer offers with a grimace.

“Too right, Mr. Ace, sir,” Kryten says. “Any eggs?”

Five minutes becomes twenty becomes forty, and still no Lister. At one point, there is a crash into the door, and Rimmer sits bolt upright and looks across to see nothing more than a skutter trying to navigate around the doorjamb. He slumps and sulks over his toast, which he doesn’t even need to eat, technically. For the last few minutes, he has been absent-mindedly pushing a few baked beans backwards and forwards across his plate, painting abstract smears of tomato sauce across the ceramic. Lister’s food has gone cold; the toast is staler and harder than drunken Sudoku; the Heart Attack Coffee is entirely solid.

“What a waste,” Kryten laments as he peers into the congealed grease-coffee. “We haven’t had such a senseless waste since Miss Kochanski insisted on handwashing all her clothes so that I wouldn’t touch them.”

Rimmer lifts his head, fork frozen in his hand. “Kochanski?” he repeats. “As in, the woman? Navigation Officer Kochanski?”

“Oh, of course!” Kryten says. “I forgot you would have been familiar with her. Oh, yes. She lived here for a time. And a most infuriating time it was, too! Always leaving her ridiculous lacey underpants around and making the place smell _fruity_ and _fresh_.” He harrumphs indignantly. “That’s my job!”

“I don’t understand,” Rimmer says, voice tight. “How—was she a hologram?”

“Oh no, no, she was from another universe. Alive—and married to Mr. Lister, if you can believe it!”

Rimmer’s stomach sinks.

“Not our Mr. Lister, that is,” Kryten clarifies hurriedly. “Good heavens, no—I would never have allowed it. Another Mr. Lister, from her own universe. She was quite set on getting back to him, and—well. I was only too happy to oblige her on her mission.”

“So, she never…” Rimmer trails off. He doesn’t even entirely know what he’s asking, much less how to ask it. “She and Lister—this Lister, I mean—they—”

“I don’t believe so,” Kryten says, “although I admit that it’s been many years since I paid any close to attention the state of Mr. Lister’s bedsheets. I find that if I turn a merrily blind eye to the state of his laundry, or disengage my sensory units when I’m scrubbing, then I don’t get through spare heads quite so quickly!”

In other words, even Kryten doesn’t know for certain.

With a fork, Rimmer slowly mashes his food flat. He doesn’t need to eat and while he does like doing it, half of the time it’s because a meal is something of a celebration, an event to be shared with other people. He doesn’t feel much like celebrating when it’s just him, the Cat, and Commander Toilet Attendant. It feels like a waste of time.

“More tea, Mr. Ace, sir?” Kryten offers, holding the pot out.

“No,” Rimmer says. “And, really—just Rimmer is fine.” He sighs, setting down his cutlery, and pushes his plate away.

***

So many things have changed which Rimmer feels powerless to resist. The Cat has commandeered the captain’s quarters, which Rimmer feels is both undeserved and deeply inappropriate, but he doesn’t know how to challenge it; his favourite mug is out of commission, the plain white JMC mug with his initials painstakingly inked on the bottom, and now he’s continually served cups of tea in an entirely different plain white JMC mug which doesn’t belong to him; his seat in the drive room has been fiddled with, cranked forwards so that his knees fold into his chest, tilted backwards like he’s about to give birth.

However, any time he so much as attempts to change the radio station, someone—usually Lister—will snap at him to change it back.

Even Kryten has got into the habit of delicately taking things off him and setting them back the way they were, gently fretting _oh no, sir, Mr. Lister doesn’t like us to put things back in the cupboard; he likes them all over the counter. Oh no, Mr. Ace, sir, we keep the posters in the corridor at jaunty angles, sir—Mr. Lister thinks they look obnoxious when they’re perfectly straight._

All told, Rimmer feels not so much like he’s in the way as much as if he barely exists at all.

Worst still is the knowledge that Lister is determinedly avoiding him. At first, Rimmer had been convincing himself that this is not the case, that he is being paranoid and that in a ship this size it is entirely possible for two people’s paths not to cross regularly, but there are little hints dropped here and there—for example, when Rimmer asks the Cat where Lister is, and the Cat says, _he told me not to tell you_.

One day, Rimmer asks Kryten, and watches in dismay as Kryten unfolds a sheet of paper and reads out, “He is touring South-East Asia with the Rolling Stones.” Then, at Rimmer’s glare, he backtracks with, “I mean—I meant to say—that he is—he is—what was it—counting his chickens.”

“You’re a terrible liar,” Rimmer says. His eyes flick to the sheet of folded A4. “Did he give you that?”

“No,” Kryten says, and his left eye twitches.

“Is that just a list of excuses so that you don’t have to tell me where he is?” Rimmer asks.

“No,” Kryten says.

Rimmer stares him down.

Kryten’s left eye is watering pungent blue oil.

“Is a chihuahua a species of potato?” Rimmer asks.

“No,” Kryten says, and then wails, and both eyes spin like a fruit machine.

Rimmer swears at him and stalks off down the corridor. He never thought he would be in this ridiculous predicament; usually, he is the one trying to get away from Lister, fervently wishing for peace and quiet, trying to find somewhere to sit quietly and read _Morris Dancing Monthly_ without being constantly interrupted by inane questions. And yet here he is, constantly trying to track the grotty bastard down.

By the third day of drifting around like a bad smell, Rimmer is getting thoroughly fed up and he is done with pussyfooting around, so to speak. He is going to talk to Lister. He is going to hunt him down and make smegging small talk and polite meaningless chitchat even if it kills him all over again.

Having made up his mind, he marches decisively into the old captain’s quarters and demands, “Do you know where Lister is?”

The Cat doesn’t so much as twitch. He is sprawled across the double bed in a satin nightgown, head hanging upside down off the edge, eyes blissfully closed. He has headphones shaped like cat ears—which seems to Rimmer to be overkill—and is for all appearances, utterly dead to the world.

“Cat,” Rimmer says, and then more insistently. “Cat!”

No response. Not so much as a twitch. If it weren’t for the fact that he is loudly purring, Rimmer might believe the Cat was dead.

Rimmer reaches for the headphone cable and yanks it out. The Cat jolts, startled, but no more startled than Rimmer is to hear the Cat’s own voice blaring out of it, reciting in low, soporific tones, _you are gorgeous… you are a beautician’s nightmare… you are the inspiration for most plastic surgeon’s careers… you are breathtakingly stylish…_

The Cat sits up with a glare. “The hell is your problem?” he says indignantly. “It was getting to the good bit.”

“Where’s Lister?” Rimmer asks.

“You think I know? Usually, I just follow the smell.” The Cat snaps his fingers. “Hey, have you tried whistling and stamping your feet? That sometimes works.”

“He’s not a dog,” Rimmer says coldly.

“Then answer this: why is it so successful?”

Rimmer frowns, floundering for a moment. “He—it’s just—shut up, I don’t have time for this. Do you know where he is or not?”

“Not.” The Cat snatches his headphone cable out of Rimmer’s hands. “Now, do you mind? You left me on a cliff-hanger.”

Rimmer swears at him and heads out.

“You’d have better luck if you had a tasty treat for him,” the Cat calls after him, and Rimmer disregards that in favour of hunting for Kryten. This, at least, is somewhat easier—the Cat’s nightgown is a sure indication that Kryten is currently dry-cleaning several hundred tuxedos, hand-washing silk neckerchiefs, and scrubbing dried curry stains.

Sure enough, he finds Kryten easily in the laundry room, using a mortaring trowel to chisel something thick, hard, and orange from a heavily bleached T-shirt that hasn’t been properly white in years. Behind him is draped a Hawaiian shirt so holey and so vigorously darned back together that it that it is more stitching than fabric, a regular Frankenstein’s monster of sartorial disasters—so, evidently, he has seen Lister at some point today. Checkmate.

“Afternoon, Kryten,” Rimmer says pleasantly. “Where’s Lister? Actually, no—let me reword that. Tell me where Lister is, and that’s an order.”

Kryten bolts upright, eyes widening in dismay. “Oh, but—Mr. Ace, sir! I have contradictory orders from Mr. Lister and—”

“Did you not hear me? I said, that’s an order. Look, I’m in the Space Corps,” Rimmer says, and points to the badge on the front of his flight suit—and yes, he is still wearing the stupid smegging gold flight suit, not least because he can’t get any of his old clothes because he has been unceremoniously banished from his old room by an ex-boyfriend who apparently won’t even grant him the mercy of comfortable trousers. “That means that while I’m on board, I’m in charge. Where is he?”

“I don’t know, sir!” Kryten says mournfully. “I haven’t seen him in several hours—he could be anywhere.”

Rimmer stares him down, eyes narrowed.

“Well,” Kryten hedges. “I suppose—I could always run a ship-wide scan and locate him.”

Rimmer grimaces. “I feel like that would be an invasion of his privacy,” he muses, gnawing on his lower lip. “Oh, go on, then—where is he?”

Kryten lays down his laundry torture implements, lumbers across to the wall-mounted screen, prods a few buttons, and then waits. And waits. He drums his giant metal sausage fingers against his chest plate. “Stand by, sir,” he says to Rimmer. “The little wheel is spinning.”

Rimmer pinches the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb.

“Aha! Found him—on G-deck, sir,” Kryten declares. “Down by the starboard battery bank.”

Without a word, Rimmer turns and leaves.

“Passive-aggressive mode engaged,” he hears faintly from behind him. “You’re welcome!”

Rimmer ignores this.

He doesn’t immediately go down to G-deck, as it transpires. Instead, he spends a while wearing out the floor in front of the lift, agonising over whether or not this is a good idea. On one hand, if Lister doesn’t want to see him, then surely pestering will only serve to drive him further away… but then again, supposedly absence makes the heart grow fonder, except clearly Lister is broken because Rimmer’s been absent for yonks and Lister’s heart is about as fond as an allergy-prone beekeeper’s, so maybe relentlessly badgering him is the way to go. Christ, Lister fancied him before when he couldn’t shut up for love nor money, so maybe idiotic ramblings are something of an aphrodisiac for him.

“Are you getting in or not?” the lift asks irritably.

“Shut up, I’m thinking,” Rimmer snaps.

“Hell’s bells. Don’t hurt yourself.”

“I said, _shut up_!”

Rimmer huffs his breath out in one short, frustrated burst, and stalks into the lift, which—with a long-suffering sigh—clanks shut to begin the slow trek down to the engineering decks. On the way down, he takes a seat on the bench and tries to plan what he might say to Lister when he arrives. He can start casual, nonchalant even, asking a few normal questions: how he’s been, if he’s read any good books recently, whether he thinks armadillos are real, if he’d like to hold Rimmer’s hand or suck his dick or both—

Smeg. _No, that’s ridiculous. Stop thinking with your downstairs brain,_ he reasons with himself. Not everything has to be about sex. Not everything has to be about—about touching Lister and sensually, erotically kissing him with tongue and playing with his hair and—

Shitting hell. Rimmer crosses his legs.

Thankfully, he manages to calm himself down in the remainder of the descent, and by the time he is let out onto G-deck he is back to feeling nauseatingly nervous, which for him feels more or less like the default.

At last, he finds Lister hunkered down on the floor, haphazardly splicing wires together.

“There you are,” Rimmer says, as though he hasn’t been very deliberately tracking him down.

Lister lifts his head. “Hey,” he says distractedly. “What’s up?”

Rimmer leans a shoulder against the door frame, so casual it hurts, and tries hard to act as though he has no ulterior motives. This is just a normal, boring conversation, such as two friends might have. He is not going to ambush Lister with big, terrifying, philosophical questions like, _if you send your boyfriend away on a one-way trip into deep space and never technically discuss things like exclusivity and long-distance, is he trying to kill you or just trying to dump you without the awkward ‘_ I think we should see other people’ _chat?_ He shrugs, rubs a hand over the nape of his neck. “Thought I’d come and see what you’re up to.”

Without looking up, Lister waves one of the wires in the air. “Just trying to fix the alert system.”

“Oh.”

Rimmer waits to hear more—maybe an explanation of why, or what he’s doing, or some version of Lister’s usual frustrated ramble, the way he likes to talk out whatever he’s working on until one or both of them admit defeat—and is treated only to an increasingly uncomfortable silence. He is just standing in the doorway, watching Lister fiddle about with wires, chew at a section of rubber cabling to separate a particular strand, pry it loose with a screwdriver, tape something else in place, and Rimmer realises that Lister is not going to say anything else.

Rimmer clears his throat. “Do you—er, want a hand?”

He doesn’t want to help. He can’t really be arsed, but it is the only thing he can think to say to sustain the conversation.

Lister’s eyes flick up to him, just for a second, then away. “No. Thanks—I’m okay.”

Rimmer has no idea what to do with that. For Lister to turn down help is one thing; for Lister to turn down an opportunity to take the piss out of Rimmer for even offering to help is rarer still.

Silence settles between them again. Lister tears off a strip of duct tape with his teeth, secures the wire, and leans backwards under the panel at his back to flip a switch. Nothing happens. He swears under his breath, sits up, and begins peeling the tape off again.

This doesn’t need to be this difficult. Rimmer has had conversations before. He’s had lots of conversations—lots of them with Lister specifically, in fact. Most of them, it’s true, he was slagging him off, but that doesn’t mean to say that he is incapable of stringing words coherently together now.

_Have you ever eaten a snail? I found a button on the floor once. Great Zero-G match last week. Someone once said in school that my father hated me and that would make me gay, and I think about that anecdote more than I should. What do you think about The Cranberries?_ _Out of interest, do you still like me as a person?_

Rimmer’s fingers twist together. He feels as though his body is fizzing with nervous energy, probably best dispatched by bouncing his leg at high speed, but that winds Lister up at the best of times. His mouth is very dry.

While Rimmer is struggling internally, Lister asks, “So how long were you planning to be on board?”

Rimmer looks up. “What?”

Lister gestures around them with the roll of tape. “Here,” he clarifies. “How long are you sticking around for this time?”

For a moment, Rimmer’s mouth flaps uselessly. He hadn’t really considered this. “Oh,” he says, at last, in a small voice. “Well. I suppose I had sort of hoped that I could stay.”

Lister stares at him.

“Maybe,” Rimmer hedges, sensing that his first answer was not exactly well-received. He offers, as a compromise, “For a bit, at least. Then I could… I don’t know.” He swallows. “Leave. Again.”

Lister grunts inconclusively and tears off another strip of tape. He carries on with his work as though Rimmer isn’t even there, and Rimmer stares down at his feet and starts listing Napoleonic battles in his head to counteract the humiliation of the possibility that he is imminently going to burst into tears _._ Toulon, Montenotte, Lodi, Borghetto—he’s forgetting at least one, and his eyes burn and his throat is closing off. Shit. _Shit._

Lister says, “Was there anything else you were after?”

Rimmer lets his breath out, slow and shaky. “No,” he says, after a beat, and hears his voice wobble. Mondovì, Castiglioni, stupid smegging Millesimo. And that’s without even getting into the Wars of the Second Coalition. He breathes through his nose and tightens his jaw and balls his hands into fists tight enough that his knuckle ache. He wants more than anything to skulk out with his tail between his legs, but for once, he is stubbornly refusing to run away. “Not really, no. I just—I suppose I thought we might… talk.”

Lister rips off a length of tape, gets it stuck awkwardly to his thumb, has to scrap it, start again. “About what?”

There’s the big question—because Rimmer has no idea what to say to him. “I dunno,” he admits. “Anything.” For a moment, Rimmer just watches him work, prying wires apart, rerouting circuitry, making small careful moves with pliers, parcelling out duct tape. He takes a breath to bolster his courage and tries, “I think we’ve got loads to talk about.”

Lister doesn’t look up. “Nah, you’re alright.”

To his credit, Rimmer only slightly flinches. He might feel as though he’s been gutted by Sweeney Todd’s clumsier brother, but he likes to think he keeps that relatively under wraps. There is that awful stinging at the back of his nose and eyes, but it’s unlikely that Lister will notice seeing as he won’t even look at Rimmer. For the first time in his smegging life, it seems, Lister is a hundred percent focused and dedicated to getting a job done and doing it well, and Rimmer can’t fault him for that, even if it emotionally disembowels him to think that Lister weighed Rimmer’s return home against a dodgy wire and the wiring won.

He has no idea what to say now. In the end, after a brief battle with his own larynx where he isn’t entirely confident that his voice won’t crack, he settles with an intelligent, “Oh. Okay.”

For reasons that Rimmer can’t fathom, he still doesn’t leave. He just stands there, waiting, staring at the top of Lister’s head where he is determinedly ignoring him, and he wills him to look up. _Just once, just look up. Just look at me._

He doesn’t.

Lister flips over a small metal panel, screwdriver in one hand, and starts clattering away at some rusty screw or other. “I’ll see you later, then,” he says as he works at it, and even Rimmer isn’t thick enough or tone-deaf enough to miss that memo.

Without saying goodbye—call him paranoid, but he gets the impression that Lister wouldn’t really care to hear it—Rimmer turns and goes.

Idiot. Idiot. _Idiot._ You stupid, useless, smegging pathetic worm. As he heads back to the lifts, what he agonises over most of all is the fact that he can’t even understand what the matter is. Even at his angriest, his most furious and betrayed, Lister has never been one for the silent treatment. Shouting, throwing things, threatening to smack Rimmer in the teeth—any of that would be easy, familiar at least.

But this? Rimmer has no idea what to do with this, and it is so bewildering and alien that he keeps coming back to the same nauseating fear: that this is not his universe, nor his Lister, and that he is trapped here forever.

Partway back down the corridor, footsteps echoing in the quiet, Rimmer realises that he has not heard Lister resume his work. No banging, clanking, scraping, no swearing at stubborn wires and the scratches they gouge into fingertips. He pauses, half-turns back, and he listens. Nothing. As though Lister has just set down his tools to sit there in the empty silence.

***

No matter what Lister does, there are certain inescapable commitments that he cannot worm out of, and one of them is mealtimes. Apparently, Lister is rationing his dietary intake to limit the extent to which he is in the same room as Rimmer, but there are rare occasions when his hunger makes him come crawling reluctantly back, and then it comes down to this: Lister and Rimmer on opposite sides of the same table, trying not to look at each. Whatever talk they can cobble together is stilted, collapsing around Lister’s bad mood like a dying star, and they’re all the pathetic sad debris caught in the sulky gravity well. Over one cup of tea, Kryten had attempted to fill that silence by describing for them all the pairs of lone socks he’s successfully matched up; at another interval, the Cat had wanted to sing a song about his own sleek and muscular calves.

So far, today has not shown any promise to be better than the last few days, but Rimmer has to at least try to dredge together some sense of optimism about this, or he will simply throw himself into the reactor.

When he gets down to Parrots’ Bar—because, yes, they are still eating in here as though it’s some weirdly impersonal canteen for people who used to get along and now can’t stand the sight of each other—he is early, of course. From the kitchen behind the bar, he can hear the distant clattering sounds of utensils, interspersed occasionally by Kryten swearing inoffensively a la the spinning of nipple nuts, etc. The Cat follows shortly after, paying little attention to Rimmer, in favour of vaulting the bar instead to grab a bottle of blue liqueur and checking it first against the silver of his dinner jacket as though to make sure it matches his outfit.

Lister comes sloping in, and Rimmer sort of loses whatever tenuous control he usually exerts over his motor functions: he jerks upright, pats at his chest with both hands as though planning to smooth his jacket and getting lost along the way, goes to put his hands in his pockets—misses—and just strokes his own thigh weirdly. He says, “Lister.”

Eyebrows raised, Lister looks over at him. He is unwashed, unrested, and largely unimpressed. He wears the same clothes as he has been wearing since Rimmer arrived, although there is a smear of what looks like Wotsits dust across the front of his boilersuit, which is a new and fashionable addition. He looks comfortable and soft and warm. “Hey,” he says, and pushes his hands into his pockets. Smeg, he makes it look so easy. “Alright?”

“Yes—yes, thank you,” Rimmer says, bobbing forwards a step, perhaps too eagerly; Lister takes a neat step back and then looks away, over towards the bar.

“What’s for tea, Kryters?” Lister asks, and at that moment, a fire alarm goes off. He blinks, exchanges a mystified look with the Cat, and says, “Wasn’t me.”

Rimmer lifts his head, momentarily disoriented by the alarm and trying to place it—Molly? _Wildfire_? Deadly catastrophe?—and is underwhelmed when his rational brain catches up and says calmly, _No, you goit. Incompetent android in the kitchen._

In rushes Kryten, a tea towel in each hand, flapping maniacally to clear the air around the nearest smoke sensors. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he wails, fleeing back behind the bar and into the kitchen. “Dinner will be in just a moment, sirs!”

“D’you need me to get another fire extinguisher?” Lister calls.

“No, thank you!” Kryten shouts back. “Although I do wish you’d stop taking them to use for Wheely Chair Jet Pack races! Far be it from me to prevent you from having fun, but I do think that there are some sports which have not been picked up by the Intergalactic Olympics committee for a reason!”

The Cat pulls a face. “He’s got you there, bud.”

Lister grimaces.

After a moment, the alarm cuts out and Kryten returns, harried and sweating oil from his neck rivets, holding a tray laden with curries strong and pungent enough to deglove a rhino. “Here we are, sirs. My apologies for the delay. Don’t be concerned—the fire alarm has just been a touch sensitive recently.”

“Yeah, wonder who caused that?” the Cat says, and glowers at Lister.

“Aw, come off it,” Lister says. “If my cooking’s enough to set it off, then the fire alarm was broken anyway.”

“Your cooking?!” the Cat echoes. “That wasn’t cooking, that was Darwinism.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Lister drops down heavily into the nearest seat and starts grabbing for poppadoms like he’s worried they’re going to vanish if he’s not quick enough off the mark. The Cat grabs the seat beside him before Rimmer can get to it, and so Rimmer is awkwardly consigned to the far corner of the table, next to where Kryten is still faffing about with sag aloo.

For all of Lister’s enthusiasm when it comes to food, that same enthusiasm is not applied to the conversation. He isn’t by any means rude, but unusually reserved and uncommunicative. He seems to approach his evening meal with the same outlook as a man volunteering to have his back teeth surgically removed by sledgehammer—nothing more than an endurance test. Luckily, it doesn’t all fall on Lister’s shoulders, for once.

“You must have some exciting stories for us, then, Mr. Ace, sir,” Kryten says as he portions out a vindaloo fragrant enough that it makes Rimmer’s eyes water.

“Oh, well,” Rimmer says, feeling his face heat up but privately pleased that finally someone, _someone_ has asked to hear about his adventures. “You know—some things, now and then.”

“We’ve heard all those stories before, though,” Lister says, cracking a poppadom into ever smaller and smaller shards. “We get the gist.”

“I don’t got the gist,” the Cat says, and looks expectantly at his own plate. “I’m gistless!”

“Erm.” Rimmer fiddles with his drink and flounders briefly, searching for the words to begin or even the correct story to share. “Well. There was this one occasion where, er—there was a volcano, a planet which was all volcano and I had to—there was a ship, which was the problem, so I had to evacuate them all in small groups while the lava came rushing towards us faster and—oh, I should say, the volcano erupted. And they couldn’t fly. That was the problem. So—it was all very stressful and we could’ve died but it all came out alright in the end. Or at least, mostly alright. There was one lad who broke his ankle but that’s neither here nor there, really.”

“Very commendable, Mr. Ace, sir,” Kryten says. “It’s hard to believe the transformation. We’re used to seeing you as a cowardly, incompetent weasel—seeing you so heroic is certainly a surreal change.”

Rimmer huffs a half-laugh, vaguely aware that he should be offended, but to be honest, this feels like the first normal conversation he’s had so far. This, at least, is something he knows how to talk about. “Imagine how surreal it is for me! One minute I’m saving humanity from being obliterated by time-bending fascists and the next I’m here eating vindaloo.”

Lister scrapes loudly at his plate, scooping curry and rice back and forth, cutlery squealing.

“Well, you’re sure as hell an improvement on the Rimmer we had before,” the Cat says. “That dude made accountants look fun.”

“I think I’m not as wet and weedy as the old Rimmer, at least,” Rimmer says. “The other day—well, the other millennium—there was a time hole in Dimension 3121 and it was marvellous—well, not marvellous, it was a bit of a nightmare, really, but it turned out for the best. Civil war had broken out, which wasn’t ideal, and there were lots of people getting more and more hacked off with the way that the resources from the rift were being distributed—because the rift had, erm, it had… some kind of gems, I think. Or uranium?” He hesitates, trying to remember. “Not sure. Can’t remember. But the rift had opened—a proper rift, from, you know, an earthquake, and the uranium—or the gems—or was it plutonium?”

Rimmer’s brow furrows in deep concentration. Uranium… plutonium… what’s the sodding difference? Smeg, he _did_ know, he remembers Molly telling him all about it, but then he does also remember being snooty and telling her that he already _knew_ the difference, thank you very much indeedy, and that he didn’t much like being condescended to by a computer with an asymmetrical haircut.

“Erm.” Rimmer’s face scrunches further as he tries to think. “Maybe it was—or actually… no, I think it was plutonium. Yes, I think so. Anyway, the rift had opened and—everyone wanted some, so there was all this daft fighting, and anyway, I had to save the day, _again,_ and let me tell you, I felt a thousand miles—a thousand and one—a thousand and three—”

“Counting’s not a strong point,” Lister mutters.

“—miles away from the wimpy Rimmer of yesteryear,” Rimmer finishes excitedly. “Not so much as a snivel, honestly! I was very brave.”

“Most remarkable!” Kryten exclaims. “It sounds as though being Ace keeps you very busy indeed.”

“It really does,” Rimmer says. “Most days I didn’t even have time for a cup of tea in the morning. It was a real strain.”

“Of course, we’ve had our fair share of excitement here,” Kryten says with a jovial sort of chortle. “Just last week—do you remember, Mr. Cat, sir?—you spilled some coffee on the floor and it formed a very amusing shape. Perfectly perpendicular!”

Rimmer raises his eyebrows. “Incredible.”

The Cat gives a low whistle, shaking his head. “And the week before that, I ripped the seam of my best velvet shirt and couldn’t repair it so that the glitter lay right against the grain. It was a wreck! But then I did also eat three tuna sandwiches in ten minutes that day, so it wasn’t all bad.”

Kryten leans in and whispers conspiratorially, “There was, in truth, some correlation between the three tuna sandwiches and the ripped seam.”

“Phew, it’s been a real rollercoaster,” the Cat says.

Rimmer takes a deep breath. “And you, Lister?”

Lister looks up as though startled to be included; largely, for the last ten minutes or so, he has been alternating between shovelling curry into his face and scratching idle destructive patterns into the surface of the table with the butt of his fork. “Hm?”

“How have you been?” Rimmer asks, and he doesn’t mean for his voice to change like that, to drop quiet and uncertain. Judging by the way Lister glances at him, he wasn’t expecting it either. He meets Rimmer’s eyes for a fraction of a second and there is a flash of something across his face that makes Rimmer feel weightless and off-balance, like a tightrope walker on a windy day.

“Yeah,” Lister says. He drops his eyes to his plate. “Fine. Good, cheers.”

Rimmer watches him anxiously, waiting for more. Nothing comes. Instead, Lister starts to pick at his teeth with his thumbnail.

“Well, after all your heroics, Mr. Ace, sir, I fear your sojourn on _Red Dwarf_ may be less than inspiring,” Kryten says. “Of course, you’re welcome to stay as long as you require. Naturally, we understand that soon you’ll be jetting off to greener pastures, but as long as you need somewhere for a little break, a jaunt away from the old dimension drive, we’re happy to host you.”

“You make it sound like a holiday resort,” the Cat says disdainfully. “Like we got the choice of a package vacation to kick it back in the sand, or drifting through deep space in a big red crate so old the instruction manual comes with a VHS.”

“A drunken stag-do in Amsterdam it may not be,” Kryten concedes, “but when you are a hero, I’m sure any break will do. Isn’t that right, Mr. Ace, sir?”

Rimmer tries for a laugh again but it doesn’t quite work—the sound he makes is a sort of deflated exhalation, like the last bit being squeezed of an airbed. “No, I’m happy here as long as you’ll have me,” Rimmer says, and he looks around the table at an audience that seem politely interested at best; Lister, on the other hand, isn’t looking at him at all. “And, really, I’d rather you just call me Rimmer. It seems too—too grandiose, too alien, being Ace here.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t dream of it, sir. You and the Mr. Rimmer of old are lightyears apart,” Kryten says.

“Surely, I can’t be that different,” Rimmer protests.

Kryten laughs heartily. “Sir—with the greatest respect, what a preposterous suggestion!” he exclaims. “Oh, the gulf between you! For one thing, when that fire alarm went off, your first instinct wasn’t to cower underneath a table and soil yourself.”

Lister stabs forcefully at a potato. The tines of his fork squeak stridently against the plate’s enamel.

“To be fair, the table wasn’t within easy cowering range at that point,” Rimmer admits.

The Cat says, “And you don’t complain as much!”

“Maybe I’ve got more to be thankful for,” Rimmer says tentatively, and he looks at Lister, who is mushing his food into an unappealing reddish slime and, apparently, not listening.

“Well, that’s fair,” the Cat says. “Captain McDonald’s Nostrils had nothing good going for him.”

“That’s not true,” Lister says quietly, but Kryten talks over him.

“He didn’t have nothing, Mr. Cat, sir,” Kryten offers. “Remember—he did have a lot of photographs of train stations.”

“And don’t forget his trophy for Deep Space’s Biggest Asshole award,” the Cat chips in.

Rimmer rolls his eyes, huffing his breath in exasperation. “Yes, yes, alright. Well, fear not—my days of being a pathetic, odious, unlovable little cockroach are behind me,” he says airily, and that’s when Lister slams his cutlery down with enough force to rattle every dish on the table.

Everyone else at the table flinches, but before a word can be said, Lister has shoved his seat back with an ear-piercing scrape of metal on metal, nearly knocking the whole chair over backwards.

“I’m not doing this,” Lister mutters, and then he is gone.

Rimmer blinks.

For a moment, there is a heavy silence.

“Was it something I said?” Rimmer asks hesitantly.

The Cat and Kryten exchange a knowing look.

“I’m sorry about that, sir,” Kryten says at last, leaning across the table. His voice is low, almost confessional. “I assure you, it’s not personal. Truth be told, Mr. Lister hasn’t really been the same since the last Ace visit.”

Rimmer frowns. “The _last_ Ace visit? What happened last time?”

“This was several years now, sir—I must say, though, it’s a long story, and makes about as much sense as a nineteenth century Russian novel. Are you sure you have the time?”

“Yes,” Rimmer says. “I have the time.”

“Well, it all began when Mr. Lister smuggled an unquarantined cat onboard,” Kryten begins, lacing his fingers together. “He was punished for it by his superiors who saw it as highly irresponsible, and was given the option to either turn in the cat for destruction, or to go into stasis for the remainder of the expedition. Now, of course, Mr. Lister, being a true, steadfast, deeply loyal sort of slob, refused to hand over the cat, went in stasis, and as a result, he was safe in the stasis pod when a catastrophic Cadmium leak—”

“Yes, yes, thank you, Kryten,” Rimmer cuts across irritably. “I have been through all this, you know.”

“Oh! Forgive me, sir—I wasn’t sure where the divergence began.”

Rimmer frowns.

“In that case, allow me to speed forwards somewhat,” Kryten says with a sage nod. “Three million years after the drive plate had ruptured, the ship’s computer at last decided that the level of background radiation was safe enough for Mr. Lister to be released from stasis, and accordingly, he—”

Rimmer sets his head in his hands and groans.

“Oh, come on, useless,” the Cat interrupts, rolling his eyes. “Nobody cares about that part. Look—we had a Rimmer of our own a long time ago, who became Ace, although at first we thought he died in a weird AR accident—anyway, him and Lister were knocking boots forever, so he got sad when Rimmer skedaddled. Then for a while, we had a different Rimmer—mostly the same, a little heavier, worse attitude—who wasn’t interested in knocking boots, but now he’s gone too, because he had to replace the old Rimmer as Ace, since the first one kicked the bucket in action.”

Rimmer’s head is spinning. “Kicked the bucket?”

“The last time an Ace Rimmer came to visit—to recruit the second Mr. Rimmer—it became clear that this new, dying Ace was not the one we had known all those years before,” Kryten explains. “It was hard for Mr. Lister—finding out about _his_ Mr. Rimmer’s death that way.”

Rimmer’s mouth hangs uselessly open.

Kryten leans in again, prompting him, “One Ace replaces another when they die, sir? Isn’t that right?”

Rimmer doesn’t know what to say. At last, when he finds his tongue, he says faintly, “He thinks I’m dead.”

The Cat frowns. “What?”

“He thinks I’m dead,” Rimmer says again, louder now, and sits back in his seat under the crushing weight of realisation. “As in, _actually_ dead, really properly dead-dead. Oh my God—and I’m just the arrogant wanker who replaced him.”

“But… you _are_ the arrogant wanker who replaced him,” the Cat offers helpfully.

“No—I’m Rimmer!”

“Yes,” Kryten says. “Ace Rimmer.”

“Arnold Rimmer—Arnold Judas Rimmer, I’m _Rimmer._ Your Rimmer. Lister’s—Lister’s—” He can’t even finish that sentence.

The Cat frowns. “Then who am I?”

Rimmer doesn’t have time for this. He jerks up out of his seat and makes a beeline for the bunk room, almost at a run. Sod it—he _is_ running, until he trips over a skutter and falls flat on his face, but he scrambles back up to his feet and keeps going.

His brain is going at light-speed and he hasn’t even thought about what on Titan he’s actually going to say, and so as a result, when he slaps the door panel and staggers into the bunk room, he stands there for a moment like a maniac. Motionless, staring at Lister—who sits cross-legged on his bunk in threadbare socks, facing the wall, knitting something snot-green and hideous, and who looks across at him with what Rimmer understands now is not apathy, but the opposite. He doesn’t know how he didn’t see it, the tightness of Lister’s jaw, the way he won’t look at him for longer than a split-second at a time. Lister still loves him. Lister still smegging loves him.

Rimmer still hasn’t said anything. He is just standing in the middle of the room, chest heaving with exertion, feeling completely deranged. He doesn’t know what to say, how to explain.

Lister looks back down at his knitting, for all appearances intently focused on whatever stupid little manoeuvres he’s doing with his knitting knives or whatever they’re called, and in a voice that is quietly disinterested, says, “Heya. Everything alright?”

Idiotically, the first thing that bursts out of Rimmer’s mouth is this: “I’m Rimmer.”

Lister rolls his eyes, a miniscule gesture that Rimmer might have missed if he didn’t know him inside out, and says, “Okay.”

“Arnold Rimmer,” he says. “Not Ace—I’m just Rimmer. The old Rimmer.”

Lister’s hands become still.

Rimmer doesn’t know how else to say this. He thinks he might be sick. He says, “Your one.”

Slowly, Lister turns to face him, unfolding his legs to hang down off the edge of the bunk. His face is flat and unmoved. “What are you talking about?”

“I didn’t want to die out there,” Rimmer says. His heart is thunderous against his ribs; he can hear his pulse in his ears. “I came home instead.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” Lister says, voice hard.

“It does now.” Rimmer’s chest is very tight. “I wrote a strongly worded letter. It was—there were no health and safety regulations, for one thing, and no chance to take a holiday, and there wasn’t even a toilet in the ship, and the AI was really horrible to me, and I said all this in the letter and I complained and said that I didn’t think that was fair—”

Lister jumps down from the bunk but moves no closer. In his socked feet, he looks absurdly small and vulnerable, at contrast with the flinty look in his eyes. His jaw is squared and he looks like he is moments away from deciding whether or not to vault the table and deck him. “Prove it,” he says.

Rimmer’s mouth snaps shut with a click of teeth. “What?”

“Prove it,” Lister says again, and his voice is hoarse, scraped raw. “Prove to me that you’re him.”

Rimmer’s mind goes blank. “I—I don’t know how.”

“Tell me something—something only he—”

Of course, this is the moment when Rimmer forgets every titbit of information about himself. He can’t even remember his middle name. Smeg, when is his birthday? He fumbles, “My name’s Arnold Rimmer—”

“They’re _all_ called Arnold Rimmer.”

“I failed my astronav,” Rimmer tries. “Again and again. Over and over, loads of times. I said I was a fish.”

Lister says nothing. He is staring at him with an expression that is both agonised and inscrutable. His hands are clenched into tight fists at his sides.

“Gazpacho soup. I cocked up my chance to be an officer because I was too busy being a prick.”

Still nothing.

Rimmer’s throat is closing off. His head is whirling and the things that he wants to say are all fragmented, nonsensical. Things that for years he hasn’t let himself think about, he now has to parse together like his death depends on it. “We—it was Christmas. You kissed me. We played cards and you kissed me afterwards. I mean—that wasn’t the first time. Sort of complicated. There was—there was AR. And once—once—and it was always—Fridays.”

Lister only looks at him.

“Courting was on Fridays,” Rimmer says faintly. “At seven. I made you a timetable.”

Lister’s brow crumples. He says nothing still, but he takes slow, unsteady steps towards him, and there is something like recognition in his face.

He comes closer, and then he reaches out for Rimmer. His hand hesitates in the air between them, his fingertips skimming just shy of the fabric of Rimmer’s clothes at his sleeve and shoulder, and then he reaches up further as though for Rimmer’s face.

Rimmer doesn’t breathe. Lister is searching his face, and there, at last, is the look that Rimmer was expecting when he first barrelled into the hangar, the hopeful uncertainty, hesitant warmth in his dark eyes as he looks over every facet of Rimmer’s expression. He brushes a curl away from Rimmer’s forehead, and then he pushes his hand carefully, hesitantly, through Rimmer’s hair. Rimmer doesn’t know if the hair is what does it or something else besides—truth be told, Rimmer feels that his brain is barely operating, and every cell in his body is currently hard at work on trying desperately not to cry—but he thinks that Lister knows him.

“Rimmer,” Lister says, in a wavering voice that is barely a whisper.

“Honey, I’m home,” Rimmer says feebly, and Lister pulls him down by the back of the head and kisses him.

It’s not even a good kiss. Rimmer is so on-edge that he ducks in too fast and he sort of misses Lister’s mouth and he gets a lip full of teeth, and then all the tension of the last few days stretched taut between Rimmer’s ribs just suddenly snaps like a rubber band and Rimmer hears himself make an ugly, idiotic noise that, to the uneducated layman, might sound like a sob—but it isn’t. He just sort of chokes and he has to drag in a shaky gasp of air and instead of kissing Lister again, he just gets his arms around him and holds on tight.

Oh, God. Oh, God. He made it home. It’s okay. He made it. He’s here and he made it, and Lister stinks. Christ, he _reeks_ —unwashed body odour and stale breath and sharply acrid vindaloo farts trapped in the same underwear that he’s probably been wearing for weeks—and Rimmer buries his face in the crook of Lister’s shoulder and breathes him in.

Lister has a hand fisted in the back of Rimmer’s hair and an arm locked tight around his neck to hold him there, and Rimmer is just holding on, both arms bracketing his waist and crushing Lister to him. His arms tighten around him, his hands curling into the coarse fabric of Lister’s grotty, crusty, disgusting boilersuit, and his heart is drumming frantically between them to the point of feeling dizzy.

“You idiot,” Lister rasps, his breath a hot burst against Rimmer’s throat. “You idiot, you idiot—” His arms tighten further still, nearly strangling Rimmer, his fists clenching and clenching in Rimmer’s hair, and he is trembling against Rimmer where he clings desperately to him. “You idiot,” he says again, louder now, and he is still shaking but his voice is steadier, and then steadier still—surprisingly steady, actually, surprisingly forceful: “You _idiot_!” he bursts out, and then he draws back and, out of nowhere, he punches Rimmer hard in the arm.

“Ow!” Rimmer squawks, jerking back.

“The smeg are you playing at?” Lister shouts, and hits him again.

“What are you—ow! Will you stop? Ow— _ow_! Stop hitting me!”

“I thought you were dead, you useless prick—”

“Well, that isn’t _my_ fault,” Rimmer protests, shying backwards with his hands up to protect himself from the next blow. “I never said—”

“Another Ace,” Lister accuses, shoving at him, “another Ace showed up here, some jumped-up twat wearing your face and saying you got fried in some electrical storm—”

“I had nothing to do with that!” Rimmer argues, slapping Lister’s hands away. “That’s not my fault, I was minding my own business saving the universe—”

“Then why didn’t you say anything when you first arrived? Why didn’t you tell me that you were, you know, you—”

Rimmer balks at this, offended at the very idea that he would need to defend his identity from imposters. “I didn’t think I needed to—”

“You could’ve at least just _checked_ —”

“How—?!”

Lister raises his voice over his protestations, louder and angrier and right up in his face. “All this time you let me go on thinking—”

“I didn’t know you were thinking anything! Truth be told, it would be something of a rarity—”

“You’re full of shit, you absolute cowardly, weaselly piece of smeg—you didn’t so much as _mention_ who you were, and I hadn’t heard from you in eight years—eight years, Rimmer, eight _fucking_ years when I didn’t hear shit from you—”

Outraged, Rimmer reels back, mouth falling open. “What am I supposed to do, postpone the Plutonian civil war to send a fax— _pip-pip, greetings from somewhere in another universe, still alive and kicking actually—”_

“A single, measly, piddling word might’ve been nice—”

“Alright, okay, one word,” Rimmer snaps. “You want one word? Here you are, here’s one word: _you’re the one who smegging sent me off to become Ace_ _in the first place—_ ”

“That’s about ten words, you idiotic—”

“More than ten,” Rimmer points out, and starts passively-aggressively counting on his fingers to prove it, but he doesn’t get very far because Lister yanks him in by his ears and kisses him.

In an instant, Lister’s hands are on his face and Rimmer hauls him forwards by the front of his boilersuit and up onto tiptoes. This kiss is better, searing and open and fierce, Lister pressing into his space so forcefully that it pushes Rimmer back a step, and then Lister is stumbling after him. He steps on Rimmer’s foot and half-crashes into him, and Rimmer gets his hands on him, steadying, but it seems that Lister isn’t interested in getting back his balance; he uses that momentum to push Rimmer backwards, staggering until his back hits the wall and Lister can crush him against it.

A sound is knocked out of Rimmer’s mouth, but it is smothered by a bruising kiss, Lister’s tongue and his teeth, and Rimmer pushes a leg between Lister’s thighs. He drags him in closer so that he can feel the line of Lister’s cock, and when he palms at Lister’s waist, slides up his back to haul him closer, closer still, so that they are flush together everywhere and there is a snap-second of searing, delicious friction between them, and Lister’s hips pulse instinctively forwards into him. His mouth falls open on a helpless breath of sound, and he has Rimmer’s chin and jaw in his hand, his thumb pulling at Rimmer’s lower lip to drag his mouth open until he can lick inside.

Rimmer is already breathing ragged, snatching air in desperate gulps between presses of Lister’s mouth, between the hot slide of Lister’s tongue in his mouth, and Rimmer’s knees are going to jelly. He wants him—oh, Jesus, he wants him. Rimmer is pressed to Lister the length of his body, solid and sturdy and warm, the soft bulk of him, an arm curling around his waist to drag him in until Lister is half-tilted back by it, and Lister has both hands on Rimmer’s face to kiss him hard, open-mouthed, breathless and gasping.

When Lister drops down from tiptoes, Rimmer follows, body curving after him. Lister’s hands skate down Rimmer’s collarbone, down his chest, sparking white electric heat all down his spine. Rimmer feels simultaneously naked, like Lister’s every touch is fingerpainting on his bare skin, and like he is wearing far, far too many clothes. He jerks back to give himself enough room to get at the front of his flight suit, and Lister helps, fumbling with buttons and yanking at the fabric to get him undressed.

Rimmer’s hands are shaky, and somehow, he has lost all dexterity in his fingers so that he struggles to get the zip of his jacket down. He can hear his pulse in his ears and his face is getting very hot, and all he can think is that his lightbee is going to genuinely overheat and kill him. Lister kisses him as they finally, smegging _finally_ , figure out the pull tab, and Rimmer’s patience is already fraying as he writhes inelegantly to get his arms free. Then Lister gets his hands underneath Rimmer’s idiotic white jumper—fucking hell, why was Ace into wearing so many layers?—and his palms are hot and dry sliding over Rimmer’s stomach and ribs, and Rimmer hears himself make a breathless noise so embarrassingly desperate that it makes his ears burn.

Then it transpires that Lister is only going under the turtleneck to find the opening of his trousers, and Rimmer goes to help him with it, but while he is fumbling with belt loops, Lister breaks away and pants, “Come on, come on, out the way.” He slaps at Rimmer’s hands and takes over, snatching and tugging at Rimmer’s clothes with single-minded, feral intensity as he tries to get everything undone. “Let’s go, let’s get to the good bit.”

Rimmer bursts out with an incredulous laugh, and he holds his arms out obligingly wide to let Lister work. “Whatever happened to foreplay?”

“Foreplay is for wimps,” Lister says, yanking—a button pings loose and clatters to the floor somewhere—and then he is working Rimmer’s nice, spangly trousers down over his hips like he’s trying to take his skin off along the way, on a single-minded, obsessive quest to find bare skin. “We can do that later—get your keks off.”

With another huff of a laugh, Rimmer leans back to kick free of his trousers, and in the meantime, Lister tears at his boilersuit, wriggles free, lets it drops as far as his hips, where it gets stuck—he’s not been on a diet and exercise regime in the years that Rimmer’s been gone, let’s put it that way—and then Rimmer interrupts that whole process because he pushes his hand down to find his dick. Lister makes a choked sort of gasp and grabs at him, and the sound is a spark to the already short fuse of Rimmer’s arousal. He kisses him.

It’s messy, all teeth and tongue and heat, but fierce, Rimmer splaying a hand over the back of Lister’s head to hold him there and kiss him stupid. Lister is already hard and getting harder, his hips shifting to grind into Rimmer’s palm through his thin long-johns, and God, just the shape of him, the damp spot of cotton at the head of his dick—Rimmer’s head is spinning. He doesn’t know what he wants, only that he wants to be close to him. He dips his head, mouthing at Lister’s jaw, his throat, his shoulder, lower, tongue hot against the dip in Lister’s collarbone where his undershirt falls open, and Lister’s fingers tighten on his shoulder, his breath snagging at the scrape of teeth over his skin.

“Jesus, Rimmer,” Lister manages, and Rimmer slides his wet, open mouth up the side of Lister’s neck to suck at the hinge of his jaw. He wants to touch him everywhere, to get his hands and his tongue on him, to make him grunt and gasp and swear and say that he loves him.

He shoves at Lister’s boilersuit to get it the rest of the way down until it pools round his ankles, and Lister kisses him as he kicks ineffectually free of it, left only in his horrible, horrible long johns, his mouth heavy and hot and wet. Their tongues slide together, and Lister wraps a hand around the back of Rimmer’s neck to drag him into him, to kiss him deeper and more insistently, to bite at his bottom lip in a way that makes Rimmer’s breath catch and his hips hiccup forwards to press his dick against Lister’s thigh. He doesn’t mean to, but the friction is exactly right, heavy and hot and solid, and it’s been so long that Rimmer can’t help but grind into the crease of Lister’s thigh. The pressure sends a bolt of electrifying heat through him and he has no control over the groan that rises in his throat.

“Bed,” Lister pants against Rimmer’s open mouth, even as his hips jump to press harder against him, practically riding Rimmer’s thigh. “Yeah?”

“Good idea,” Rimmer says, and doesn’t make any move to get there, too busy clutching at Lister’s hips and his arse, dragging him in so that he can feel him everywhere, and then Lister’s hand is on Rimmer’s jaw to push his head back and leave searing hot, open-mouthed kisses over his throat, his Adam’s apple, the hinge of his jaw. “Yes, we should—oh—” His fingers tighten, digging into the meat of Lister’s arse—and what a magnificent arse it is!—as Lister sucks at his pulse point in a way that makes his breath come ragged. “Lister—yes—”

“Bed,” Lister says again, breathless and low, the words hot against Rimmer’s skin. “Bed—”

“Absolutely—” Rimmer manages, and still doesn’t move, because currently he’s got Lister tonguing at the hollow of his throat, and Lister is grinding his cock into Rimmer’s palm in shallow little movements through his long johns, and Rimmer isn’t an idiot. He knows when to stay put.

“Come on, let’s—” Lister pushes at him—with his hands, this time, not just his mouth and his dick and his entire body—and just about breaks away far enough to breathe. “Seriously. Bed.”

“Yes,” Rimmer says, which might be the only word he remembers how to say. Then he turns around to move this shebang to the bed, and he remembers a few other words, because he looks at the bunk and physically recoils. “What the ever-shitting God-awful _fuck_?”

The bottom bunk—Rimmer’s bed, that is—is an absolute fucking state.

Lister seems puzzled, and then turns around and follows Rimmer’s gaze. “Oh, that.”

Rimmer doesn’t know how he didn’t notice until this point, except that he was fairly preoccupied with A) letting Lister know he was alive, and B) trying to fuck his brains out, but _Jesus Christ_. It is piled high with just total and absolute, complete and utter garbage of all descriptions: empty food containers, laundry both washed and unwashed, a handful of jigsaw puzzle pieces, some crappy romcom DVDs not even in their cases, crusty dishes, half a mouldy sandwich, his guitar, battered and well-used magazines, an even more battered and well-used centrefold of a blonde straddling a motorbike, a ripped bag of cat food, several hats, empty cigarette cases… It looks like a hoarder’s wet dream.

Actually, no—Rimmer is fairly certain that a hoarder would look at this disgrace and think that perhaps Lister might have a problem.

Rimmer stares, open-mouthed, repulsed and astonished in equal measure. He has seen skips at the edge of building sites in better condition than his old bunk. He would have a more comfortable lie-down in the local landfill. “What the smeg did you _do_?”

Lister hesitates. “Long story,” he says, and then hops inelegantly up onto the top bunk. He pats the mattress beside him, which is at least clear of debris, but which does also crunch ominously, as though it might be full of stray Sugar Puffs. “Come on, up you get.”

Rimmer stares helplessly up at him. “There isn’t a ladder,” he says petulantly. “How on Earth do I get up there?”

Lister rolls his eyes. “Come on, don’t be wet,” he says. “Just jump. Look, I’ll catch you and all.”

That sounds like a good way for Rimmer to break something—either furniture or his own limbs. He takes a deep breath, braces both hands on the edge of the bunk, pre-emptively flinches, and sort of awkwardly half-jumps up. Lister grabs him by the hair and armpit as he slips, and he hauls him up as Rimmer scrambles frantically for purchase.

“Smeg!” Rimmer exclaims, nearly falling off backwards, and when Lister pulls him to safety again, he overbalances by a significant margin. He falls on top of Lister, and when he props himself up on his hands, he finds himself between Lister’s sprawled thighs. Win-win.

Lister meets his eyes with a wicked grin, and that’s all it takes for Rimmer to get back on board with proceedings. He surges forwards to kiss him, mouth open and wet, hot slide of tongue, teeth and heat; Lister bites at Rimmer’s bottom lip, fists into Rimmer’s hair and tugs, and _shit,_ Rimmer actually whines. It’s an arrowhead of arousal and heat that lances through him, makes his skin prickle and his hips snap forwards, and his mouth falls open on another breathless sound.

Hands find the hem of Rimmer’s stupid sodding turtleneck—Rimmer’s hands, Lister’s hands, who smegging knows at this point—and peel it off over his head, and as soon as he’s free of it and whatever consequences removing it has on his hair, he dives to kiss Lister again. Everything is skin and heat and desire, and Rimmer’s hands are everywhere, finding the ridge of his hipbones, the soft give of his belly, scratching over the inside of his thighs, palming over Lister’s ribs and his chest, thumbs dragging at his nipples until Lister’s head tips back with a low, ragged sound with _fuck_ smothered in it.

Rimmer mouths at Lister’s collarbone, pushing at his ratty, fusty long johns, but he can’t get it down properly while Rimmer is knelt between his thighs, and he is not willing to move just yet. His compromise is this: he yanks all the buttons open, wiggles the long johns down far enough to get access to his dick, and that’ll have to be close enough.

From the first moment that Rimmer gets his hand on Lister’s dick, unrestrained by clothes, Lister starts swearing and doesn’t stop. It starts off with _smegging hell_ as Rimmer sweeps his fingers through the slick of pre-come, turns to _shit, okay, fuck,_ as Rimmer jacks him slow, thumbing under head, and then it’s just _fuck, oh, fuck, oh fuckfuckfuck_ as Rimmer shimmies down and takes him into his mouth. He doesn’t faff about with any idiotic performative shit, just sucks him down and braces his hands on Lister’s hips to let him fuck his mouth. He remembers what to do. He remembers how he likes it.

The thrill is insane, the way Lister groans as the head of his dick nudges thick into the back of Rimmer’s throat, the way his hands find Rimmer’s hair and just hold on, the way his hips rock unconsciously up and up into it, pushing into Rimmer’s face harder until Rimmer’s eyes smart and his jaw hurts and his mouth feels hot and raw, and Lister’s stomach is trembling. Rimmer can feel Lister’s pulse beating beneath his thumb, and with every desperate roll of his hips to fuck into Rimmer’s mouth harder and faster, Lister’s breath is a burst of frantic sound and he gasps, “Fuck, Rimmer, fuck, just like that, _fuck_ —”

Rimmer sweeps a free hand round the back of Lister’s thigh to pull his legs open, to settle more comfortably in the vee of his thighs. He plants his hand, then, in the small of his back and uses that pull him in deeper—and then he changes his mind, and with Lister in his mouth, he slides his hand down under his long johns and goes for his hole. He presses the pad of his thumb against the entrance, gets nowhere for it, all resistance, except that Lister’s breath seizes and his back arches and he comes.

Rimmer sort of chokes, sort of swallows, and nearly dies—again. He can’t really breathe, and he also has to contend with the way that Lister’s thighs instinctively tense as though trying to crush his head (although… what a way to go), but Lister’s hips flex once, twice, riding through it, and then he relaxes.

With the least sexy sound ever made, Rimmer pulls off and wipes his face, but while he’s still struggling to catch up, Lister’s hands are soothing backwards through his hair and pulling him upwards. Rimmer swallows again, and Lister’s hands find his face then, his thumbs sweeping across Rimmer’s lower lip, both affectionate and tidying him up a touch, and Rimmer loves him so dearly that he doesn’t have words for it.

“Did I mention it’s been eight years?” Lister says weakly. “Though, Christ, you’re composed—”

That’s as far as he gets because then Rimmer is kissing him again, his mouth hot and wet, pushing the salt on his tongue into Lister’s mouth. He scrambles up his body – nose knocking against Lister’s, mouth open – to kneel over one hip and peel those stupid ugly long johns off, and he gets between Lister’s thighs again. They are tangled together, half sideways, Rimmer still straining in his boxers as he tries not to get too worked up because he wants, he wants—

Lister knows what he wants. He fumbles blindly behind him on his shelf, knocking shit everywhere—something goes down the side of the bed, a can of lager gets knocked off and crashes down to the floor below, a magazine following shortly after—and then he comes back triumphant. One unpleasantly sticky bottle of lube, the lid nowhere in sight.

Rimmer wrinkles his nose, but there’s no arguing with the entirely proficient way that Lister handles the bottle, and he decides not to think too hard about Lister using this on his own for the best part of a decade. He is absolutely determined not to get himself too fired up. He is _not_ thinking about Lister writhing on his own fingers, leaking onto his stomach with _Rimmer_ on his lips—nope, not thinking it, not thinking it, _not thinking_ —and then the fantasy gets harder to ignore, because it’s more or less happening. There is Lister, sucking on Rimmer’s bottom lip like his life depends on it, and there Lister is, upending a _ludicrously_ excessive quantity of lube into a pool on his own stomach, while Rimmer blinks, equal parts baffled and repulsed; there Lister goes, smearing a hand through it and reaching down to open himself up with practiced ease.

“Jesus,” Rimmer manages, his voice strangled between two octaves.

The heat in his gut only stokes higher when he dips his hand down to help. Their fingers slip together, slick and greasy, and when Rimmer pushes inside alongside Lister’s own finger, he feels like his brain has gone to static, his skin gone molten, so hard it hurts and that desperate heat curling low in his gut.

He finds Lister’s mouth again, kisses him rough and breathless and desperate, and he fucks two fingers into that tight heat, Lister rocking his hips back against him to push him deeper, his head tipping back to gasp for air. He looks absurdly, ridiculously, outrageously good like this, mouth open and slack, lower lip swollen where Rimmer’s been biting at his mouth, the bare column of his throat as he gasps and groans, _fuck, Rimmer, come on_ , one arm up over his head to brace against the head wall of the bunk recess so that he can push back and fuck himself on Rimmer’s hand, the peaks of his dark nipples, sweat shining on his skin.

Rimmer ducks his head to mouth at the bolt of Lister’s jaw, breathing ragged, torn between the desire to rut against his own forearm until he comes and the fervent desire to see this through for fucking _once_ , not to come before he gets inside Lister—but then Rimmer slides his fingers deeper into him, harder, and Lister’s mouth opens on a moan, and Rimmer’s restraint is stretching thin. His entire body is heat and desire, and he feels like he doesn’t have a single thought in his brain except how badly he needs, biologically, medically, intrinsically, needs to fuck Lister stupid.

“Come on, come on,” Lister pants, and Rimmer’s fingers twist inside him, and Lister’s voice twists too, turns into a desperate noise, half grunt, half cry, and Rimmer buries his face into the crook of Lister’s neck. He breathes wetly against his skin, kisses his collarbone, bites at the muscle in the slope of his shoulder hard enough that Lister gasps, “Fuck, Rimmer—” and his fingers tighten on Lister’s thigh because God, he— _God_ —

Rimmer tries to communicate what he’s thinking, but he has lost every smidgen of cognitive ability he has ever had, and so all he says is, “I’m gonna—” and then he loses his train of thought, derailed to the pulsing urgency of _don’t come don’t come don’t come don’t you dare._

“Yeah?” Lister says breathlessly, and he curls a hand into Rimmer’s hair, uses that grip to jerk him up to look into his face. His eyes are wide and dark and bright, and Rimmer has absolutely no idea what he has trying to say before he looked at Lister, because—and this is important, this is very important—he is in love with him. He is utterly, idiotically in love with him. Lister moves his hand to cup Rimmer’s jaw, thumbs at his lower lip. He raises his eyebrows. “Rimmer?”

Oh! He remembers now. “I’m gonna—fuck you, I think.”

Lister wheezes a laugh. “Smegging hell, you think?”

In Rimmer’s defence, he thinks his lightbee only has finite processing power, and given that most of it is currently dedicated to a sort of blind, maniacal worship of Lister’s soft, beer-squishy, vaguely stale-smelling body, he is doing remarkably well to say, “Erm, I’d like to.”

“Get on with it, then,” Lister rasps. His chest is heaving, pushing against Rimmer with his every breath, and Rimmer can hear his own heart pounding. “Come on, fucking get in me, idiot—let’s go, I’m ready. I’m ready, you ready?”

“Yeah, I think—yeah,” Rimmer rambles inarticulately, and Lister sits up to help Rimmer shove his boxers down. He wiggles to get free, his legs feeling far too wobbly for any kind of complicated manoeuvres, and then he comes back to Lister hooking his legs round Rimmer’s waist. “I’m gonna fuck you,” he says again, his brain caught on a loop. “I’m—”

“Hurry up and do it, do it,” Lister says, going again for the belly-smear of lube to slick Rimmer up; his hand is tight and perfunctory as he jacks him, and it still pulls a thoroughly undignified noise from Rimmer, while a shiver ripples the length of his spine and heat snaps in his gut. “Come on, come on—”

Rimmer can barely breathe. “I’m gonna—”

“Come on, then, do it,” Lister goads, and he anchors a hand at the nape of Rimmer’s neck while Rimmer aligns himself. “Come on, big man, you’re all talk—”

“I’m doing it, shut up, I’m—”

“—so do it, fuck me, come on,” Lister runs his mouth, and he doesn’t shut up until Rimmer pushes inside. Lister’s back arches and his breath cuts out with a long, low groan, and then they are just tangled there, unmoving, sweating and shaking and inseparable.

Oh— _oh_ —it’s a lot. It’s too much, in fact. Rimmer’s entire world is narrowed down to this, to Lister’s pulse and the gasp of his breathing, the slide of Lister’s skin and the heat of his body and the way that he trembles and Rimmer feels it to his marrow.

“Okay?” Rimmer manages, and thinks that his command of the English language at this point is nothing short of miraculous. “Are you—can I—?”

“You better had do,” Lister gasps, and he rolls his arse back against Rimmer in a way that tears an involuntary groan from somewhere deep in Rimmer’s chest, and Rimmer feels like he is only marginally in control of the way that his hips snap forwards to fuck into him.

Lister’s ankles cross in the small of his back and their bellies slip together in the disgusting, sticky mess of lube that Lister has created, and Lister’s fingers lift something like electricity on Rimmer’s skin everywhere that his hands skate over his chest, his sides, his back. His mouth is open and slack, and his skin feels hot everywhere, blood pounding in his face, and nowhere hotter than where he is pushing into Lister.

It’s pure sensation, and Rimmer is pressed deep inside the clutching, tight heat of Lister’s body and yet caught instead on all the stupid, little, lovely things—Lister’s mouth, the wet shine of his lower lip; the luminous dark warmth of his eyes tracking over Rimmer’s face to check he’s okay; the gleam of sweat on his skin, in the hollows of his collarbone, the fine hair on his sternum slicked up by it into all daft directions; the way he looks at Rimmer—and Rimmer sees it now, what was missing from all the other ones. This is it. This Lister—this.

“Hey, you okay?” Lister says, and his hands are framing Rimmer’s face, his thumbs gentle on Rimmer’s cheeks, his fingers pushing into the hair over his ears. “Rimmer?”

“I don’t know,” Rimmer admits, and his voice is a hoarse sound, his throat tight, and his hands are shaking. “I’m just—I—”

“Yeah, I know. D’you need me to slow you down? Hold on, let me—let me say something unsexy. Uh, Kryten made me clean the grouting,” Lister says. “Had to use an old toothbrush to get in all the corners.”

Rimmer doesn’t trust himself to speak, just nods mutely.

“There was mould everywhere,” Lister goes on, and he is petting Rimmer now like a traumatised service animal, stroking the back of his neck, smoothing sweaty curls back from his forehead. “It was rank—he made me do the toilet as well. You’re okay, Rimmer. You’re alright.”

Rimmer takes an unsteady breath and kisses him. His mouth tastes stale and sour, like he’s been gargling pond water with a tabasco chaser, but Lister’s thumb on his jaw and his palm over Rimmer’s pulse point makes him feel grounded in a way he can barely remember. Lister’s mouth opens and Rimmer pulls in a breath that sounds like a gulp, sounding raw and shaky.

Slowly, Rimmer rolls his hips forwards into him, and for all his urgency before, now he is careful, terrified of ending this when it has barely begun. He fucks into Lister, presses him back into the mattress, feels it when Lister’s back arches and he lifts his hips into him with a breathless groan. Lister is still holding onto him, a hand cupped round the nape of his neck, palming his jaw, and he kisses him between every other careful thrust.

“Yeah, that’s it, big man, like that, come on,” Lister says, his usual idiotic goading, but his voice is soft and his eyes are shining, and his thumb sweeps gently over Rimmer’s cheek and Rimmer feels like he is coming apart. “Come on, I got you.”

Something is wavering in Rimmer’s chest and he doesn’t know why it feels like that, like his throat is closing off and his head hurts and his hands are trembling where he plants them either side of Lister’s shoulders. It feels so good, and yet somehow he is also strung out thin, feeling scraped and hollow, and everything in him aches.

“Hey,” Lister says, his voice somehow gentler still, “hey, you’re alright, darlin’, I got you,” and when he starts wiping carefully at Rimmer’s face with his thumbs, that is when Rimmer realises that he is crying.

“Oh, smeg,” Rimmer says pathetically, and his voice cracks like it’s thinking about doing a runner and leaving him with only stupid sobs for communication, and he squeezes his eyes tightly shut. “Sorry—sorry.”

“Rimmer, you’re fine,” Lister says, cradling Rimmer’s jaw in both hands. “Look—my arse has that effect on a lot of people.”

Shaking his head, Rimmer manages a feeble, wet-sounding laugh. He drops his head with a dull _thunk_ against Lister’s shoulder, and he takes deep, slow breaths that shiver out of him like air from a badly compressed accordion.

“Come on, you’ve gotta pull it together,” Lister says, threading his fingers through the back of Rimmer’s hair. “I’m meant to be the soppy one. You’re gonna set me off in a second, and if we both start crying through sex, we’ll never live it down.”

“But no-one else will know,” Rimmer says, voice muffled, into Lister’s shoulder.

“I’ll know,” Lister promises. “And I will take the piss every single day.”

Rimmer swallows thickly and takes another deep breath. He lifts himself up onto his elbows over Lister, who has tears in his eyes too and who just gives him that stupid, wide, toothy, incandescent smile—and with that, Lister slowly, carefully rolls his hips back against Rimmer in a way that sparks at the edges of Rimmer’s every nerve, that makes his breath snag in his throat.

“Yeah?” Lister says quietly, his hands smoothing down Rimmer’s neck, his shoulders, over his chest. “You okay?”

Rimmer nods. He doesn’t trust himself to speak without doing something pathetic like bursting into tears again, so he just bites his lip and nods and keeps his eyes on Lister. Slowly, experimentally, he rolls his hips forwards into Lister, and Lister’s breath seizes. Nothing more than short, simple movements, rocking into him, and then Lister tilts his hips to pull away. The slow slide is excruciating, every nerve-end fizzing and Rimmer’s skin feeling hot and tight, until the moment when the head of Rimmer’s cock catches on the rim of Lister’s hole, and the sound that breaks out of his throat is half-groan, half-sob.

Lister is shaky, his mouth open, and Rimmer swallows thickly against the feeling that he might be about to burst into tears again. He just focuses on Lister; nothing else matters. He moves with him, slow thrusts that leave all that pent-up arousal simmering under his skin, that makes Lister’s mouth fall slack on a soft, breathless sound. The look on Lister’s face is open, almost awed, and when Rimmer pushes in deep, his head tips back and his throat works to gasp for more.

Lister reaches across and fumbles to find Rimmer’s hand, laces their fingers together and lifts their tangled grip to pin his own hand to the mattress above his head. Rimmer presses him back into the mattress and dips his head to kiss him, mouth open and slick and slow, until the next thrust makes his breath hitch sharply in his chest.

“Is that,” Rimmer tries to say, and his voice wobbles again and he gets no further.

“It’s good,” Lister says raggedly into the inches of space between their lips, and he kisses him, and against his mouth, he says, “It’s good, Rimmer, it’s good, come on,” and he kisses him. When Lister pulls in a breath, it is a low, shaky noise, and he goes on kissing him.

Rimmer feels he can barely breathe, feels real for the first time in years, feels stretched thin and on the verge of falling apart. When Lister pushes his shoulders back into the mattress to lift his hips into the next thrust, Rimmer slides impossibly deeper and hears himself make a strained, desperate sound, and his blood is beating so hard and so high in his throat because he thinks he might genuinely die. Again.

“God, yeah, do—do that,” Lister pants, his voice cracking, and when Rimmer next snaps his hips forwards, harder this time, Lister’s head tips back with a gasp and his back arches into it, his thighs tightening around Rimmer’s ribs. His free hand gropes blindly for Rimmer, curls round his bicep to hold on. His fingers, lube-tacky, slip on Rimmer’s skin at the next thrust, and Lister drags in a breath that wavers near a moan at the end. “Yeah—oh, fuck—oh, _fuck_ —”

It feels desperate now, urgent, Rimmer driving hard into him with his every breath a low, shaky noise. Everything in him is raw need, reduced to the bright, heavy pulse low in his gut and the way that it snaps hotter when Lister clutches at him and won’t shut up, endlessly running his stupid, gorgeous mouth.

“Fuck—” Lister bursts out, and his fingernails are digging into Rimmer’s bicep. “Oh, _fuck_ , yeah, like that, darlin’, like that—like that—” He fists his free hand into Rimmer’s hair, and it barely qualifies as pulling but the prickle of Rimmer’s scalp does something to him, his skin a flashfire and a helpless, greedy sound rising in his throat, but then Lister uses that grip to pull him down into another bruising kiss, hot, slick, messy.

The slide of Lister’s tongue, the scrape of his teeth—it all comes down to this, to everything that Lister is, and Rimmer is pressed deep and still not close enough. The way that his eyes on Rimmer’s face are too bright, his eyelashes too wet; when he slides his free hand up to palm at Rimmer’s jaw with rambling hoarse, breathless encouragement, _keep going, Rimmer, like that, come on, come on, big man_ , and Rimmer flushes fiercely hot all over; when Lister curls his fingers into Rimmer’s hair and pulls him into another open kiss, to gasp into his mouth, _yeah, I got you, I love you, like that_ —and Rimmer is shattered by it. There are these involuntary hitching sounds in his mouth that wobble dangerously between a gasp and a sob, and all he can do is press his forehead against Lister’s and chase that feeling.

Then, all out of nowhere, it is upon him, so close and so overwhelming that any kind of rhythm falls to the wayside, and his hips stutter and he squeezes Lister’s hand until it hurts, and the only words he can form are a desperate, stuttering, “I’m—oh, fuck, _fuck,_ Lister—Lister—" and then he comes hard.

Rimmer is not exactly sure when it is, in relation to the orgasm, that he bursts into tears, but it all gets fairly muddied together. The important part is that he came, and that was good, and then he felt like he had been hollowed by an ice-cream scoop, which was bad, and now he is crying so hard that he is making stupid, humiliating noises.

Fucking hell. God forbid he catch a smegging break.

Still, his crash back to reality isn’t too bad because Lister is cradling his face in his hands, and the very surreal part is that for some reason, Lister is also crying.

“You can’t start crying,” Rimmer croaks. “I’m crying. I started first.”

Lister is properly crying and everything: trembling, eyes red, tears running down his cheeks, the whole shebang—how long has _that_ been going on?!—and he lets go of Rimmer’s face to rub roughly at his eyes. “Yeah, well, you already had a cry,” he says mulishly. “It’s my turn now.”

“No, it’s my turn still,” Rimmer blubs, and he pulls back to sit on his heels, pressing his knuckles to his own mouth to try and somehow smother the ugly-crying that is still happening there. “It’s been my turn all along—I’ve been away for years and years, you have to wait until later.”

“I thought you were dead,” Lister says weepily, and he wipes his nose with the back of his hand. “It’s my turn to have a cry now—smeg off.”

The sheer audacity— “I _am_ dead. I got incinerated. I remember, I was there—you weren’t, you were in stasis. Smeg, where’re the tissues?”

“What tissues?” Lister says, sniffing.

“That bottle of lube was far, far too grotty and well-used for you not to have tissues nearby.”

Lister fumbles on the shelf behind his pillow but comes up empty. “Shit, sorry, I think I dropped them.”

Rimmer lunges out to grab the box of tissues from the floor, and is incredibly startled to remember that he is on the top bunk at the exact moment that he falls out of bed.

“Smeg, Rimmer!” Lister shouts, far too late, because by that point, Rimmer has crashed in a heap on the floor. He lands on his arse, whacks his funny bone hard on the way down, and twats his heel against the frame of the bottom bunk, and it hurts a surprising amount—so much so, and so surprisingly, that it startles Rimmer out of crying, and he starts to hysterically laugh.

He is sprawled, naked and sweaty and tear-choked and breathless, on the bunk room floor, a throbbing pain radiating from his elbow, and he looks up at Lister on the top bunk, who is still ugly-crying, now with the added bonus of a sort of baffled hiccupping.

“Are you alright?” Lister sniffles, rubbing roughly at his face.

“Oh, I’m alright,” Rimmer says with wild, high-pitched hysteria. “I’ve had worse falls recently.”

Lister frowns. “What?”

“Long story.” Rimmer sits up, wiping at his face with his hands, and he glances around behind him. “Where are these tissues, then?”

With a drawn-out and unpleasantly meaty sniff, Lister props himself up on his elbow and peers over the edge of the bunk. “Er—down there, somewhere.”

“Thank you,” Rimmer says. “The international cartographic society will be calling any day now. _Where,_ exactly?”

Lister points, an instruction only infinitesimally vaguer than his previous directions; ultimately Rimmer finds a battered box of Kleenex under the table, which he throws at Lister, only calling _heads-up_ once the box is already in the air and T-minus-one to hitting Lister in the chest. It’s another inelegant scramble back up onto the top bunk, and then Rimmer sits at the far end of the bed and watches as Lister yanks tissues out by the fistful to mop at his blotchy face.

Conversationally, Rimmer says, “You’re really going for it, aren’t you?”

“Smeg off,” Lister says, voice wobbly, and he blows his nose in a loud, horribly wet-sounding blast. “You got to have your cry. I’m not finished yet.”

Rimmer huffs impatiently, but then, he supposes he does have to concede that at least he was fairly certain Lister was alive the whole time. He didn’t have to mourn or grieve or anything, or put up with what he thought was a shit impersonation of Lister trying to have a chat with him for the last few days at every possible moment. For once, graciously, Rimmer thinks that maybe Lister deserves to have a bit of a cry.

“Sorry,” he says, after a moment, surprising even himself. He loops his arms protectively around his drawn-up knees. “For, erm. Not mentioning it sooner.”

Lister shrugs loosely, his chin ducked into his chest as though he’s trying to hide his face from Rimmer. “In fairness, I think you did try a few times,” he mumbles. “That bit’s my fault. I just—I didn’t wanna—you know, I thought—”

“No, I know,” Rimmer says.

From opposite ends of the bunk, they look at each other. Rimmer’s face still feels hot and uncomfortable, but he imagines that’s not much compared to Lister, who is still actively crying. There are big fat tears streaking his face every time he swipes them away and every now and then, he takes a deep, shuddering breath to steady himself, and then his mouth crumples all over again, and his face scrunches as though he’s fighting it without success.

Rimmer says quietly, “Listy, come here.”

Without question or comment, Lister balls up his tissues in his fist and crawls up the bed to Rimmer. It’s clumsy, Lister banging his head against the top of the bunk recess, but he manages to find his way in, tangling himself in Rimmer’s legs and arms, the two of them fumbling and shimmying awkwardly until they fit. Finally, they find a space together—Lister tucked under Rimmer’s arm, his head not so much pillowed on Rimmer’s chest as much as tucked half into his armpit. His face buried in Rimmer’s skin, his hand clenching and unclenching reflexively on Rimmer’s sternum. His breathing coming slower and steadier. Rimmer’s hand soothing down between his sweaty shoulder blades.

Gradually, the room grows quiet. Rimmer’s heart stops beating wildly; Lister’s breath is even and regular; they have both stopped shaking.

Lister wipes his eyes with his fingers. “Well,” he says, clearing his throat, “we can never speak of this again.”

“Look, the nervous breakdown is part of the fun of it,” Rimmer says. “On my part, I’m just glad we got more or less to the end before we both went bananas. Although—” He realises, then, and he lifts his head to look at Lister. “You didn’t—”

Lister tilts his head up against Rimmer’s chest to look at him. “What?”

“You know,” Rimmer says, and sort of wiggles his shoulders in what he thinks is a perfectly clear explanation, but only garners the same blank look from Lister. “You know! The second time, you didn’t, er, get to—finish.”

“No, I did,” Lister says with a frown. “That was one of the very first things that happened. Smeg, did you hit your head when you went over the edge? D’you not remember sucking me off like your life depended on it?”

“Oh—well, no, I know—but I was thinking—” Rimmer falters. “I thought maybe—”

Lister places a hand gently on Rimmer’s stomach and looks up at him with an expression which is half-affection, half-grimace. “Rimmer, man, I’m forty.”

Rimmer’s face falls. Shit. Eight years. He keeps forgetting.

“I mean, don’t get me wrong, I was having a great time,” Lister says earnestly. “Seriously, well done. Blew my mind. And my back too, probably, but—fucking hell. Have you been practicing?”

Rimmer hesitates.

The truth is… yes, he has been practicing. But he doesn’t know if he’s allowed to tell Lister that. The thought occurs that perhaps he has actually been cheating on Lister for the last half-decade or so, while Lister pined faithfully at home, gazing out at the far-off twinkle of stars and wondering when his superhero beau would return from distant galaxies. Perhaps this is the part where he gets home to the one he loves and then gets unceremoniously dumped for infidelity. Oh, God.

Lister notices the pause. He props himself up on his elbow to face Rimmer properly, eyebrows raised. “Have you?”

Rimmer gulps. “Have I what?”

“Been practicing,” Lister says, although there is no judgement there. Just a sort of muted interest. His eyes move over Rimmer’s face, taking him in. “While you were away. Did you ever…?”

For some reason, Rimmer’s knee-jerk reaction is to lie. “No,” he says, and then hates himself. “I mean—yes, I did. A few times.” He swallows. “No—a lot of times.”

Lister pauses. “What, all me?”

Rimmer can’t decide which answer is worse—a lie that would make him sound like a nymphomaniac heartbreaker, or the reality of it, which would be embarrassing and paramount to a declaration of love. He opens his mouth and what comes out is the truth. “Mostly,” he says, voice quiet and ashamed. “Although some still thought I was a twat.”

“That’s fair. I still think you’re a twat, so.” Lister takes a deep breath. “Any good?”

“Not really.” Rimmer watches him carefully, hesitant, like he’s worried that he will say one wrong thing and Lister will bolt. “You’re … not cross?”

Lister doesn’t immediately answer. He looks down at his hand on Rimmer’s stomach and he traces idle, distracted patterns there, fingertips sweeping slow across his skin. “I figure… at least someone was looking out for you.”

For some reason, this aches worse behind Rimmer’s ribs than if Lister had been angry. He wants to explain that it was different with them, that it was never like this, that it was at best passing the time and at worst filling a hole, but he doesn’t know how to say this. Instead, he settles his hand over Lister’s, rubs a thumb over the smooth skin at the back of his hand.

Lister looks up, and Rimmer fidgets under his gaze. He isn’t sure he wants to know the answer to this, but he has to ask. His eyes drop to their hands, their intertwined fingers, and he says, “There was another Rimmer, here.”

“Oh,” Lister says. “Yeah. You, but from before. He came back with the rest of the crew.”

“And you…” Rimmer trails off. “I mean—did you…?”

Lister takes a deep breath. “I did try once,” he admits. “But—well, I wasn’t much into it, to be honest. Never went anywhere. I mean, he was from before the accident,” he says with a roll of his eyes. “From before you loved me, man. He was like ten years out of date, and he didn’t half get on my pecs. We had cheese in the fridge I had more in common with.”

“Mouldy,” Rimmer offers, because he doesn’t know how else to respond to this sudden display of feeling. “Fragrant. Off-putting.”

“He was on the title card and I was on the smegging epilogue,” Lister says. “It made no sense. Little things I used to do would drive him spare—like, like the time I put growth-boosting serum in his shaving cream, or Nair in his shampoo—”

“That would drive me spare,” Rimmer says.

“That’s different.”

Rimmer is not sure how exactly different that is, but he decides not to contest this. There is still one more thing he needs to know, one question gnawing away in the pit of his stomach. He can’t quite look at Lister still, and he focuses on their hands. His thumb traces the jut of Lister’s wrist bone, the peaks of his knuckles. He says, “And Kochanski?”

Lister laughs. “No way, man,” he says. “Never in a million years. I mean, she was desperately in love with someone in another universe, and…” He trails off inconclusively.

Rimmer looks at him.

Lister says, “Well. I know how that feels.”

Rimmer’s chest is tight. “Oh,” he says, and he can’t think of anything else to say. He just looks at Lister, with his eyes still puffy from crying and his sour breath and the cluster of spots just his sideburns where he never, ever washes his smegging ears, and Rimmer’s heart feels like an over-shaken can of Pepsi ready to burst. He loves him so much it sort of incapacitates him, so much it makes him ache, but he doesn’t know how to say that out loud, so he doesn’t. He cups Lister’s jaw in one hand, thumb smoothing over his cheek, and he kisses him, and he is irrepressibly glad to be home.

***

Rimmer wakes up three times that night.

The first time, there is a faint, intermittent beeping, and he jerks awake, sits up—with a hand over his forehead to protect himself from the ceiling—and says groggily, “Molly?”

No answer. He blinks, disoriented.

Dim light from the exit sign faintly illuminates the shapes and silhouettes of the _Red Dwarf_ bunk room, and it takes Rimmer a moment to recalibrate to it. A little bit cold, parfum de body odour, the hum of the air vents, the fusty duvet, the body beside him. Rumbling a weird, snuffling snore, half-sprawled, half-curled, arse pressed against Rimmer’s bare thigh, locs all across the pillow. Lister.

Slowly, Rimmer eases himself back down onto the mattress and tries to relax. Something crunches ominously under one shoulder, and he reaches back to retrieve a chocolate bar wrapper, which he throws indiscriminately into the dark. He settles in behind Lister’s turned back, curls around him with an arm across his middle, and goes back to sleep.

The second time, he wakes up cold and there is something horrible and clammy pressed to the arch of his feet.

He pulls his feet away from the intrusive, cold nightmare, grumbling, and gropes for the duvet. No duvet. He gropes further, eyes still closed, and finds bedding implacably tangled around a body which seems very warm indeed, and—to add insult to injury—there is that faintly unpleasant, damp coldness pressing against the bottom of his feet again, and then Lister’s toenail scratches him.

Rimmer jerks his feet back with a noise of complaint. His eyes snap open and he sort of garbles, “Smegging, what—”

And _Lister_ has the audacity to grouch, from within his duvet mountain! Lister, who is not only hogging the blanket, but also trying to press his disgusting cold toes into the arch of Rimmer’s foot to warm them up, because apparently hoarding the entire duvet to himself isn’t doing enough to warm up his delicate smegging tootsies. “W’t’re doin’,” Lister says blearily around the thumb wedged in his mouth, and he wriggles closer to try and get comfortable.

“I’m trying to get—” Rimmer mutters, yanking, “give me—the—” and yanking again, more forcefully, “the _duvet_ , Lister, will you—”

Lister grumbles and pushes at Rimmer’s face uselessly with one free hand. “Gi’t a _rest_ , man, ‘m try’n’eep—” he mumbles, burrows himself deeper into the duvet except for his awful, eel-clammy, freezing toes, which graze the bottom of Rimmer’s naked, vulnerable foot again.

“Stop that!” Rimmer snaps, and Lister swears at him and then allows Rimmer to wrestle the duvet back, and Lister permits this, it seems, because as soon as Rimmer is crossly tucked underneath it, he sleepily shuffles in close to leech all the rest of Rimmer’s warmth. He slings an arm over Rimmer’s middle, pillows his cheek against Rimmer’s shoulder, mouth slack and vaguely drooly against his skin, and then almost immediately falls back asleep again. To be fair, Rimmer isn’t far behind.

The third time, there is an echoing double knock on the door and that’s all the warning they get before Kryten sidles in bearing a breakfast tray cheerfully aloft.

“Good morning, Mr. Lister, sir,” he declares brightly, depositing the tray on the table and setting out the contents. “You’ve been asleep for nearly thirteen hours now—I thought it might be a prudent time to deliver some pancakes.”

Lister makes a funny sort of grunting sound and rolls over; Rimmer, tucked in close behind, is left somewhat exposed by this and stirs half-awake. He sits up to swat at Lister to get the duvet back and thus it is over Lister’s sprawling, naked body that Kryten and Rimmer’s eyes meet.

Kryten drops the cutlery.

“Oh no,” Rimmer groans.

“Oh _no_!” Kryten wails. “Sirs, I am—I am _so_ sorry, I had no idea—please forgive my imbecility, my pure simpletonian foolishness. If you want to see me punished for my idiocy then naturally I will commit seppuku immediately, although I may need some time to find a Stanley life suitable for the job.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Lister mutters into the pillow. “I’ve got a hacksaw I’ll lend you if it’ll buy us another half hour’s kip.”

“Oh. You won’t be wanting any breakfast, then?”

“Don’t be stupid,” Rimmer says. “Leave the pancakes here.”

Lister laughs into the mattress and rolls back over to sprawl untidily over Rimmer’s chest, to curl more tightly into him, to hold him close.

***


End file.
